Socialist Demands for the COVID-19 Crisis

[blindpig]

The very bad day at the CDC
Eric Topol
Dec 28, 2021

One of my favorite books this year was Michael Lewis’s The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, a page-turner in which he traced the problematic issues of the CDC long before and intra-Covid-19 and gave it a different acronym: CDOR, the Center for Disease Observation and Reports. I did an in-depth interview with him about what he learned.

In the first year of the pandemic, the CDC was subverted by the Trump Administration even to the point of interference and censorship of its MMWR reports, stripping its control of data, and frank undermining of public health. That’s why we warmly embraced the new Administration’s proclamation that it would stick to the science. There were clearly issues with that regarding the lack of need for masks among vaccinated people, unwillingness to recognize SARS-CoV-2 airborne transmission, and mass confusion over boosters. But in the last 24 hours things have gotten much worse.

Yesterday, the CDC issued a shortened isolation period guideline of 5 days instead of 10 days for people with Covid infections. That came less than a week after they issued the guideline of 7 days for health care workers.

There were serious problems about the new 5-day isolation period. First, there are no data or evidence to back it up. Yes, we’re facing an Omicron onslaught of cases and it would be useful to come up with a strategy to avoid a mass loss of functionality among our workforce and the on-the-go public, no less in the midst of the holiday season. But that doesn’t justify issuing a vacuous guideline. Second, there was no mention of using a test, to confirm that the isolated individual is now OK to circulate, that there is no indication of infectiousness. That could be done via a rapid antigen test, which denotes infectiousness, carries some reduced sensitivity with Omicron, or via a PCR. The cycle threshold value of a PCR test is also indicative of infectiousness; the lower it is, the more likely potential for spread. Either of these tests would be far better than no test to justify a reduced isolation time in any individual.

Third, there are no data for Omicron’s clearance time. We know the characteristics of shedding and average time it takes for clearance of the virus for Delta and preceding variants, but to date we have not seen any such data for Omicron kinetics. With the Hong Kong report of 70-fold copies of the virus in the upper airway for Omicron versus Delta and prior variants, there is no certainty yet that Omicron’s clearance is fast.

Fourth, the guidance did not mention a word about vaccinated or unvaccinated status of people. We know from past studies there is a more rapid clearance among vaccinees than people who were not vaccinated, but the recommendation does not take this knowledge into account. Fifth, it assumes that all people handle the virus similarly when, it fact, there is considerable variability. Look at the data last week published at NEJM


Nearly 20,000 samples from 173 NBA participants on viral clearance by vaccinated status and variant (VoC=variant of concern)

Note from the Figure that there are significant differences for vaccinated, average 5.5 days (95% CI 4.6, 6.5), compared with unvaccinated, average 7.5 days (95% CI 6.8,8,2) There is marked inter-individual variability: for example, look at all the green dots even >20 days in the unvaccinated group, panel D. These data, representing nearly 20,000 samples, were obtained from predominantly healthy young men and may not be representative of the population at large. By the way, the NBA uses a 6-day isolation cutoff with testing with heavy emphasis on testing.

This problem can be fixed. The CDC could come out and revise their guidance and say there are no such data for Omicron (as a cover, like they did when they finally recommend boosters for all adults) and require testing. Even the airlines, which pushed for a shortened 5-day isolation period, wanted to use testing as part of that requested change in policy.

But the bad day wasn’t just about isolation in isolation. There was also the major gaffe about genomic sequencing surveillance. Here are the data from last week, and the corrected data this week, announced today by CDC. The point estimate for Omicron changed for the week ending December 18th from 73% to 22.5%, which is remarkable. We were led to believe that the country was well in the midst of the Omicron wave when, in fact, we were and are still experiencing a large number of Delta infections. As of December 25th, the point estimate is 59% with 95% confidence intervals lower 42%, upper 74%, indicating there is a lot of wobble, a relatively limited number of sequencing samples to draw upon, no less a reduction in confidence for the CDC itself.



But it continues. Yesterday, as noted by Scott Gottlieb on twitter a critique of a poor new ad for CDC to encourage vaccination to save hospital costs. He makes the point in his post that I don’t need to repeat here.



The profound data deficiency and lack of any semblance of informativeness by CDC is a topic I covered in a recent Substack post. But yesterday I found out that it takes only 3 people https://newsnodes.com/us, led by Gérard Hoeberigs, to post data promptly every day for each US state — including new cases, tests, % positive tests, hospitalizations, ICUs & deaths—and much of this for the rest of the world. But CDC has an annual budget that exceeds $7.9 billion and cannot do this. Here’s a little of what newsnodes.com posts each and every day, and you can go much deeper into states and countries around the world.



Remember the Covid-19 Tracking Project posted such data for the United States each day because the CDC was incapable, but stopped doing so in March 2021 because it was given reassurance that CDC would step up. They have never done so, particularly when it comes to divvying up hospitalizations by vaccination status (including type, timing, number of doses), variant, and patient characteristics (such as age, co-existing conditions, immunocompromised). Close tracking of breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths was promised by CDC in May 2021, but they haven’t made good on that. Instead, they have served up once a month snapshots with minimal data, such as this most recent posting, for a limited number of US jurisdictions. As previously reviewed, HHS Secretary Becerra could mandate collection of these data for all US states, but has chosen not to.

It’s now crunch time when we need to know about Omicron and whether it will prove to be less severe, and how much less severe, than Delta. We have a much lower vaccination rate and booster rate than UK, Denmark, Norway and other countries that faced Omicron dominance before us. Their experience to date of the uncoupling of cases and severe disease may not play out to the same extent in the United States, just as Delta did not. This requires having the data—virus sequencing and clinical data—-in real time or as close to real time as possible. You’d think you could get that for billions of dollars, with much more allocated this year to CDC to do far better with informatics.


Most recent posting or hospitalizations in US (limited jurisdictions) for vaccinated vs unvaccinated

To sum up, the CDC performance is disappointing and unacceptable, despite high hopes and a boosted budget to perform well. This was a very bad day. We can ill afford any more of these. The pandemic has a ways to go into 2022. We need this federal agency to “stick to the science” as promised, provide critically important data in a timely way, and avoid publishing alarming and erroneous data based on limited sampling. Let’s hope for a turnaround as fast as one we hope to see with Omicron. Never give up, especially the hard working staff and leadership at CDC, that we must rely upon for good guidance.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-ve ... at-the-cdc

Good bare-bone analysis but totally lacking even reference to the question, 'why'. Fer instance, why did CDC announce the 5 day quarantine change a day after the boss of Delta Airlines complained about the quarantine rule hurting his business? Coincidence, ya think? Naw...

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Walmart cuts paid Covid leave in half, as CDC isolation guidance changes
PUBLISHED WED, JAN 5 20223:12 PM ESTUPDATED WED, JAN 5 20226:35 PM EST
Melissa Repko

KEY POINTS

*Walmart is cutting pandemic-related paid leave in half after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cut isolation and quarantine requirements last week.
*Employees will now get one week of paid leave instead of two if they contract Covid or have close contact with someone who tests positive, the company said in a memo.
*Retailers and restaurants are navigating a complex landscape again as Covid cases surge, leading to staffing shortages at some locations.
In this article


An employee scans grocery items for pickup order at a Walmart Inc. store in Burbank, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2019.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Walmart is cutting pandemic-related paid leave in half — from two weeks to one week — after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cut isolation requirements last week for asymptomatic people with Covid and shortened the time that close contacts need to quarantine.

The big-box retailer, which is the country’s largest private employer, announced the policy change in a memo that was sent to employees Tuesday and was obtained by CNBC on Wednesday.

In the memo, Walmart said that through March 31 it will provide paid time off for employees who are mandated to quarantine by a health-care provider, government or Walmart or if they fail a health screening or test positive for Covid. It said employees who qualify will be paid for one week.

A Walmart spokesperson said employees qualify for the paid leave regardless of vaccination status.

Walmart is also asking corporate employees to continue to primarily work from home until Jan. 30, even though offices would remain open, the spokesperson said. The company had previously asked workers to work virtually until Monday.

Walmart is one of the first companies to announce changes in the wake of the CDC’s revised guidance — and its move could prompt others to revise paid leave policies, too. Last week, U.S. health officials said they would reduce the length of required isolation and quarantine to align with growing evidence that people are most infectious in the two days before and three days after symptoms develop. The federal agency’s announcement came as many industries, including hospitals and airlines, struggled to keep operations going amid a surge in Covid cases among staff.

Retailers are navigating that complex backdrop — and a variety of challenges, including having more employees out sick or scrambling for child care as schools shift back to remote learning or shorten school days. That has exacerbated staffing shortages at some retailers and restaurants, resulting in shortened hours or temporary closures.

Last month Walmart temporarily shut nearly 60 U.S. stores located in coronavirus hotspots. Macy’s said this week that it would reduce hours across all its stores for the rest of January. And others, including Apple and Starbucks, shuttered some locations.

Walmart recently reinstated a mask requirement for all employees, regardless of vaccination status. It had dropped the requirement in May, saying fully vaccinated workers and customers no longer had to wear masks.

Starting Dec. 19, Walmart announced all employees must wear masks at all company facilities until further notice.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/05/walmart ... nges-.html

Covid and workers be damned, the business of America is Business, and don't you forget it.

[blindpig]

Yes, there really were only two COVID deaths in mainland China in 2021. Here’s how they did it
Rosa Astra and Benjamin ZinevichJanuary 6, 2022

Download PDF flyer https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... sts/100966

As the Omicron variant causes record levels of infection in the United States, the end of the pandemic seems as far away as ever. But far from preparing a robust response to defeat the virus, the Biden administration is preparing to surrender and encourage the public to “learn to live with” COVID indefinitely.

Lives lost to COVID in 2021

415,000
2
3:23 PM · Jan 1, 2022

When the Party for Socialism and Liberation pointed out the fact that China has in fact succeeded at virtually eliminating deaths from the virus, we were attacked by far-right pundits like Ben Shapiro – who took the position that such a feat is essentially impossible and asserted that China’s achievement was just a massive falsification.

In the United States, which has seen more deaths from the disease than any other country on Earth, there were 476,863 new deaths in 2021, up from 370,777 in 2020.[1] However, it is in fact widely accepted that only two people died of the disease in China in 2021 on the mainland, plus 64 deaths in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and 843 in Taiwan (where the central government of China does not exercise control) – according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering COVID-19 Data Repository.[2] This brings China up to a total of 4,636 deaths in the mainland and 5,699 deaths overall since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, most of which occurred in the first few months of 2020.

While 100% accuracy is an unattainable standard in epidemiological statistics and the true numbers of cases and deaths may be somewhat higher than reported in any country, sources as varied as the World Health Organization[3], a collection of peer reviewed medical articles on China’s COVID-19 response in the British Medical Association’s industry journal[4], the Worldometer Covid Tracker[5], and even the New York Times[6] report equivalent counts for the death toll of COVID-19 in China.[7]

While China’s response to COVID-19 may have been the strongest in the world, China is not unique in handling the pandemic far better than the United States or European capitalist countries. New Zealand has taken effective measures to contain the virus and had only 26 deaths from covid in 2021.[8] South Korea, a capitalist country with about 15% the population of the United States, has had 5,887 covid deaths so far, less than 0.6% of the total U.S. death toll.[9]

Still, to someone who lives under U.S. capitalism, a medical system that can successfully curb a pandemic like COVID-19 may seem like fantasy. What did the people, government, and Communist Party of China do to accomplish this incredible result?

China’s mass mobilization against COVID-19

Learning from the SARS outbreak in 2003 within Beijing and Guangdong province, the National Health Commission published the National Emergency Plan for Public Health emergencies in 2006.[10] Since then a comprehensive plan to prepare for contagious disease outbreaks has been enacted throughout China, organizing public health agencies at local, provincial, and national levels in preparation for any future public health emergencies.[11] During the Wuhan COVID outbreak, this plan had its first serious test.

As soon as the outbreak of a novel viral pneumonia was identified in Wuhan, authorities required all suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients to be admitted to infectious disease hospitals. When these hospitals reached capacity, several temporary hospitals were built within a matter of days.[12] Public health authorities were able to request external assistance and 42,322 healthcare workers were deployed in Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei Province. National and local healthcare authorities established an epidemic response command center which directed the efforts of healthcare workers across the province. The center was able to quickly process and disseminate information on evolving best practices for diagnosing and treating the disease using social media posts, a regular newsletter, and daily online webinars attended by hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals across China.[10]

Once the initial outbreak in Wuhan was contained, healthcare officials across the country updated their implementation of the Emergency Plan to take into account the lessons learned. Hospitals in every city were retrofitted to prevent droplet and airborne viral transmission. Lines of communication were established so that front-line healthcare workers could easily report and access accurate and up-to-date information as any outbreaks developed. Offices, stores, transit stations and other public spaces implemented temperature checks and testing centers to identify new cases, often before they become symptomatic. The country has implemented a “big data contact tracing” approach with a contact tracing app to notify anyone who came in contact with someone who tested positive, and inform them on exactly how they should quarantine and/or get tested.[13] Public health officials also publish information about every known outbreak so that people who may have been exposed but were missed by the contact tracing process can also find out and get tested.[14]

Once even a single case is identified in a city, officials will institute a local “precision lockdown,” sanitize spaces, and begin mass testing. China has developed portable mass testing centers that can process millions of PCR tests per day, which have been used to rapidly test the entire populations of Wuhan, Xi’an, and other cities where outbreaks were identified.[14] Local governments work with mass organizations to deliver free food and basic necessities to those instructed to stay at home.[15] Businesses are also required to continue paying workers during lockdowns, and with an 89% home ownership rate and extremely low rents there is no eviction crisis like in the United States.[16]

While China’s response to both the initial Wuhan outbreak and subsequent outbreaks in other cities were groundbreaking and lauded by medical experts worldwide, Chinese medical authorities have learned from mistakes and continued to improve responses in later outbreaks, never shying away from open reports of difficulties.

In the outbreak within Xi’an in late December 2021, Communist Party of China-aligned media has repeatedly reported about issues regarding slow food delivery programs[17], price gouging during food shortages[18], as well as computerized health system crashes[19]. While the U.S. government treats each outbreak and variant as if they have learned nothing since March 2020, each outbreak within China is a moment of learning for government officials, the medical community and everyday Chinese citizens.

At every step of China’s pandemic response, a key element has been the organization and mass mobilization of society to combat the pandemic. The inclusion of volunteers and workers from every sector of the economy in stopping transmission of the virus, meeting people’s needs during lockdowns, and recovering after an outbreak is contained has allowed the people of China to achieve a near zero-COVID reality.

The missing tell-tale signs of a cover-up

Despite the international scientific consensus that the reported COVID case and death counts in China are essentially correct, some corporate media in the United States continue to peddle conspiracy theories about a “cover-up” orchestrated by China and/or the WHO. Forbes published an article on January 2 with a headline bombastically asserting “Beijing Is Intentionally Underreporting China’s Covid Death Rate” which suggests that China’s true death count from COVID-19 is not 4,636 but 1.7 million.[20]

The figure of 1.7 million deaths from COVID-19 in China is derived from a machine learning model developed by The Economist.[21] Liberation News spoke with Dr. Stuart Gilmour, a professor of biostatistics at St. Luke’s International University in Japan on the accuracy of this model. Gilmour explained that “The Economist applies a machine learning method to estimate excess deaths using data on COVID cases, deaths, test numbers, test positivity rates and other indicators of pandemic severity from a large number of countries.” However, The Economist’s model is missing this data for many countries including China, so “they infer the data from other sources and then apply the same machine learning model to these countries.”

While it is clear that there are obvious problems with inferring data on countries where no data exists, Gilmour added, “”t attempts to apply a model developed in countries with a pandemic to countries (like China) without a pandemic, even though the same values (like test numbers and test positivity rates) have completely different epidemiological meanings” in these differing contexts. The result? “This leads to the huge over-estimates.”

While this machine learning model may work for countries that are experiencing actual pandemic-levels of exposure, countries that follow a zero-COVID policy successfully render this model completely useless.

In reviewing various anti-China sources that assert it is inconceivable that there were two COVID-19 deaths in mainland China last year, none present evidence that amounts to more than an assumed mistrust of the people of China. However, if we were to do the job of these imperial stenographers, how would one tell if China actually was covering up mass death from an uncontrolled pandemic? A disease outbreak in the most populous country on Earth causing over a million deaths would leave hard physical evidence that no cover-up could completely erase.

Some 1.7 million dead people would leave 1.7 million bodies. During Summer 2021, India was suffering a terrible upsurge in cases and deaths, however the Indian Health Minister Harsh Vardhan insisted that the Indian fatality was “one of the lowest in the world” at the time. Crematorium workers in India quickly spoke out, and grim footage of fields full of funeral pyres spread across the internet.[22] Further, 1.7 million deaths would require China to have experienced well over 100 million cases. Gilmour notes, “Every country with such a pandemic has seen its health system collapse – as we saw in India, Italy, the USA and the UK. When this happened briefly in Wuhan in February 2020 the videos and reports of chaos in hospitals and the community were all over Western media. It’s simply impossible that the same thing could have been happening for 18 months and no reports surfaced in any media.” There have been no such videos or testimonies coming from China.

To treat patients suffering from an ostensible mass outbreak, Chinese hospitals would need respirators, medical oxygen, monoclonal antibodies, antiviral drugs and other material in vast quantities. During the outbreak in India last spring, the scale of hospitalizations led to the complete exhaustion of the country’s oxygen supplies, and doctors across the country started reporting deaths due to the oxygen shortage.[23] China has not experienced such shortages — in fact, China has massively expanded exports of oxygen concentrators and other medical equipment during the pandemic to supply countries that are experiencing large-scale outbreaks.[24]

There are around 600,000 foriegn nationals living in China, including about 72,000 U.S. citizens. The cases of sickness and death among these would generally match the population at large; if there had truly been 1.7 million deaths in China (around 0.1% of the overall population), then we would expect about 72 of the U.S. citizens living in China to have died as well. The U.S. state department tabulates all deaths of U.S. citizens in other countries; from December 2019 until June 2021 (the latest month for which statistics are available), the State Dept has recorded a total of seven deaths of U.S. citizens in China from all causes combined.[25] None are listed explicitly as having died of COVID.

For China to cover up a massive COVID outbreak would require a conspiracy of hundreds of millions of people, from front-line medical workers, to friends and family of people whose hospitalizations or deaths were being covered up (many of whom live outside of China), to the U.S. State Department’s own accounting of American deaths in China.

The evidence simply does not support the capitalist media’s claims that China is covering up a massive COVID outbreak. But worse than simply being wrong, the cover-up narrative plays into the same racist “yellow peril” tropes that inflame anti-Asian hate crimes we see day after day here in the United States.

According to Gilmour, these claims of vast numbers of unreported deaths also directly undermine effective public health policy, as it “misrepresents the effectiveness of the policies [China] follows and creates a false narrative that eliminating COVID is impossible,” and “serve only to undermine support for the only policies that work, and which ultimately every country will need to adopt.”

One virus, two systems

Approaching the third year of the global pandemic, life in China is truly “back to normal” for most of the 1.4 billion people who live there. There are occasionally short-term, localized lockdowns in response to local outbreaks, and basic common sense precautions like temperature checks and testing remain in place, but there is no active pandemic within China. On Jan. 4, there were 175 new cases and zero deaths.[5] This is a monumental success of a system that values human lives over corporate profits.

Meanwhile on Jan. 5, the United States reported over 704,000 new cases of COVID-19[1], the highest ever daily case increase and nearly seven times as many cases in a single day as mainland China has had over the course of the entire pandemic.[5]


N95 masks and rapid antigen tests are sold out or bought up by scalpers who sell them at obscene markups. PCR testing sites across the country have lines hours long. Teachers across the country are involved in labor struggles with school districts that are unable or unwilling to provide safe working conditions.[26] [27]

President Joe Biden, far from providing any sort of plan or leadership during this acute crisis, took to Twitter to tell Americans to “Google “COVID test near me”” [28]

What the dramatic difference in public health outcomes between China and the United States demonstrate is that the massive death toll of the disease here in the United States is not an inevitable natural disaster, but the result of a system and a set of policy choices made to keep the capitalists’ profits flowing no matter how many lives it costs.

The U.S. could have taken swift action in the first months of 2020 to educate the public on the dangers of the disease, distribute masks, implement mass testing and contact tracing, and prepare for localized lockdowns where outbreaks were identified. Instead, then-president Trump and the U.S. media across the capitalist political spectrum took the opportunity to demonize China and decry their effective pandemic containment measures as “authoritarian,” sowing the seeds of the anti-mask and anti-vaccine movement that undermines U.S. public health efforts today.

As Liberation News reported in April of 2021, the global vaccine apartheid created by vaccine patents and hoarding by the U.S. and Western European governments hoarding worsened the rise of new, more dangerous variants of the virus. Now the Omicron variant is driving the most infectious wave of the pandemic yet in the United States and the reality of global vaccine apartheid remains in place.

The federal government has allowed pandemic unemployment and eviction protections to expire while refusing to issue further stimulus checks. Many workers are forced to choose between having no income at all or risking being infected with the virus in unsafe work environments for wages that are still not enough to live on. President Biden is threatening to resume student loan payments on May 1. Medical professionals are exhausted and collapsing under the system of underfunded, privatized healthcare, with no support and resources for their own physical or mental wellbeing.

By sowing doubt about China’s remarkable success in defeating the pandemic, the capitalist media seeks to quell mass outrage at our own government’s criminal mismanagement of the pandemic and manufacture consent for a policy of “living with” the virus and accepting hundreds of thousands of people killed or permanently disabled by COVID every year indefinitely. But this is not the only way! The last year has proven that a socialist system that puts human lives over capitalist profits can mobilize all aspects of society and put an end to the pandemic. What is needed here in the U.S. is a mass movement to fight for a socialist plan to defeat COVID-19.

References

1 – United States Coronavirus Statistics. (n.d.). Worldometer. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/US

2 – Dong, E., Du, H., & Gardner, L. (2020, May 01). An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. The Lancet, 20(5), 533-534. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30120-1

3 – China: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard With Vaccination Data. (n.d.). WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn

4 – China’s response to Covid-19. (n.d.). The BMJ. https://www.bmj.com/how-china-responded-to-covid-19

5 – China Coronavirus Statistics. (n.d.). Worldometer. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... try/china/

6 – Covid-19 World Map: Cases, Deaths and Global Trends. (n.d.). The New York Times. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... cases.html

7 – These sources each tabulate the numbers differently, but their numbers agree when compared like with like. The John Hopkins CSSE COVID-19 data tracker reports separately for each province within China. The WHO report combined all of mainland China, the Hong Kong SAR, the Macau SAR (which has had zero deaths), and Taiwan into one number. Worldometers and the New York Times dashboard both have separate reports for each of those four areas.

8 – New Zealand Coronavirus Statistics. (n.d.). Worldometer. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... w-zealand/

9 – South Korea COVID – Coronavirus Statistics. (n.d.). Worldometer. Retrieved January 6, 2022, from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... uth-korea/

10 – Du, B., Wang, C., & Singer, M. (2021, December 02). Learning for the next pandemic: the Wuhan experience of managing critically ill people. BMJ, 2021(375), e066090. https://www.bmj.com/content/375/BMJ-2021-066090

11 – Sun, M., Xu, N., Li, C., Wu, D., Zou, J., Luo, L., Yu, M., Zhang, Y., & Wang, H. (2018, April 11). The public health emergency management system in China: trends from 2002 to 2012. BMC Public Health, 18, 474. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-5284-1

12 – Ankel, S. (2020, February 5). How China Managed to Build an Entirely New Hospital in 10 Days. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-chi ... ays-2020-2

13 – In China, This Coronavirus App Pretty Much Controls Your Life. (n.d.). Futurism. https://futurism.com/contact-tracing-ap ... oronavirus

14 – Chen, Q., Rodewald, L., Lai, S., & Gao, G. F. (2021, December 02). Rapid and sustained containment of covid-19 is achievable and worthwhile: implications for pandemic response. BMJ, 2021(375), e066169. https://doi.org/10.1136/BMJ-2021-066169

15 – Dou, E. (2021, December 30). Locked down in China’s Xi’an amid coronavirus outbreak, residents subsist on deliveries of vegetables. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... down-xian/

16 – China Home Ownership Rate | 2022 Data | 2023 Forecast | 2013-2021 Historical | Chart. (n.d.). Trading Economics. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://tradingeconomics.com/china/home-ownership-rate

17 – Xi’an enhances food supplies amid reports of slow delivery. (2021, December 30). Global Times. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202112/1243818.shtml

18 – Xi’an to strictly regulate illegal activities like price gouging to ensure a stable market. (2021, December 26). Global Times. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202112/1243429.shtml

19 – Xi’an health code system crashes briefly amid city-wide COVID-19 screening. (2022, January 4). Global Times. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1244024.shtml

20 – Danise, A., & Calhoun, G. (2022, January 3). Part 1: Beijing Is Intentionally Underreporting China’s Covid Death Rate. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalh ... te-part-1/

21 – How we estimated the true death toll of the pandemic. (2021, May 13). The Economist. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detai ... e-pandemic

22 – Ellis, H. (2021, May 1). ‘We’re burning pyres all day’: India accused of undercounting deaths. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... ing-deaths

23 – Covid-19: India outrage over ‘no oxygen shortage death data’ claim. (2021, July 21). BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57911638

24 – Li, J. (2021, May 18). Covid-19 prompts surge in China’s exports of oxygen concentrators — Quartz. Quartz. https://qz.com/2009596/covid-19-prompts ... entrators/

25 – US Citizen Deaths Overseas. (2021, September 1). travel.gov. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://travel.state.gov/content/travel ... stics.html

26 – https://twitter.com/UESF/status/1478830303913279488

27 – https://twitter.com/CTULocal1/status/14 ... 0107543552

28 – https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1478761964327297026

https://www.liberationnews.org/yes-ther ... rationnews

Twitter screenshots at link.

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US sets record in child hospitalizations due to Covid-19


At the beginning of last November, the United States began vaccinating children between the ages of five and 11. | Photo: Week

Published January 6, 2022 (9 hours 54 minutes ago)

The United States doubles the number of hospitalizations compared to the previous wave caused by the expansion of the Delta strain.

At least 1,000 pediatric patients were hospitalized this Wednesday in the United States (USA), which represents a number never reached for this nation in that age group since the beginning of the pandemic.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detailed that 951 minors under 18 years of age were admitted positive for Sars-Cov2 in the United States.

Cases of coronavirus in infants have soared in the North American nation two weeks ago as a consequence, above all, of the expansion of the Omicron variant of the Sars-Cov-2 virus.

Compared to the previous wave of Covid-19 cases caused by the Delta variant, about 400 minors were hospitalized in one day, a figure doubled this time.

A little over a month after vaccination began in infants between five and 11 years of age, the United States is experiencing one of the most complicated stages regarding the number of infections since the start of the pandemic, breaking the barrier of 600,000 cases on a daily average, and reaching figures of up to one million.

Regarding vaccination, the route most recommended by experts to reduce the rising curve of cases and hospitalizations, the US until last January 4 had vaccinated just over 62 percent of its population and despite the serious consequences if not inoculated and the warnings of the health authorities, millions of people continue to refuse to receive any dose of anticovid drugs.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/eeuu-mar ... -0033.html

Google Translator

[blindpig]

The Highest Attainable Standard of Health Is a Fundamental Right of Every Human Being: The First Newsletter (2022)

JANUARY 6, 2022


Ryuki Yamamoto (Japan), Chaos – Spin, 2019.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

As we enter the new year almost two years after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020, the official death toll from COVID-19 sits just below 5.5 million people. WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says that there is a ‘tsunami of cases’ due to the new variants. The country with the highest death toll is the United States, where the official number of those who succumbed to the disease is now over 847,000; Brazil and India follow with nearly 620,000 and 482,000 deaths respectively. These three countries have been ravaged by the disease. The political leadership of each of these countries failed to take sufficient measures to break the chain of infection and instead offered anti-scientific advice to the public, who suffered from both a lack of clear information and relatively depleted health care systems.

In February and March 2020, when the news of the virus had already been communicated by China’s Centre for Disease Control to their counterparts in the United States, US President Donald Trump admitted to The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, ‘I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic’. Despite the warnings, Trump and his health secretary Alex Azar completely failed to prepare for the arrival of COVID-19 on US soil by cruise ship and aircraft.

It is not as if Joe Biden, who succeeded Trump, has been monumentally better at managing the pandemic. When the US Food and Drug Administration paused the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in April 2021, it fed into growing anti-vaccine sentiment in the country; confusion between Biden’s White House and the Centre for Disease Control over the use of masks furthered the chaos in the country. The deep political animosity between Trump supporters and liberals and the general lack of concern for hand-to-mouth earners with no social safety net accelerated the cultural divides in the United States.




Carlos Amorales (Mexico), The Cursed Village (still), 2017.



The wildness of state policy in the United States was replicated by its close allies Brazil and India. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro mocked the severity of the virus, refused to endorse the simple WHO guidelines (mask mandates, contact tracing, and later vaccination), and pursued a genocidal policy to refuse funds for clean water delivery in parts of the country – notably in the Amazon – which are essential to preventing the spread of the disease. The term ‘genocide’ is not used loosely. It was put on the table twice by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes, once in May 2020 and then again in July 2020; in the former case, Justice Mendes accused Bolsonaro of implementing ‘a genocidal policy in the management of health care’.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi neglected the WHO’s advice, rushed into an ill-crafted lockdown, and then failed to properly assist the medical establishment – especially public health (ASHA) workers – with the provision of basic medical supplies (including oxygen). Instead, they encouraged the banging of pots in public and prayed that this would confuse the virus, creating an unscientific attitude toward the severity of the disease. All the while, Modi’s government continued having mass gatherings during the election campaigns and allowed religious mega-festivals to take place, all of which became super-spreader events.

Studies of leaders such as Bolsonaro and Modi show that they not only failed to manage the crisis in a scientific manner, but that they have been ‘stoking cultural divides and have used the crisis as an opportunity to expand their powers and/or to take an intolerant approach to government opponents’.


Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil), Carnival in Madureira, 1924.

Countries such as the United States and India – and to a lesser extent Brazil – were hit hard because their public health infrastructure had been weakened and their private health systems were simply not capable of managing a crisis of this proportion. During the recent spread of the Omicron variant in the United States, the Centre for Disease Control tried to encourage vaccinations by saying that while the vaccine was free, ‘hospital stays can be expensive’. Bonnie Castillo, the head of National Nurses United responded, ‘Imagine a dystopia in which the public health strategy is to threaten the people with the health care system itself. Oh wait, we don’t have to imagine…’.

In 2009, then WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan said, ‘user fees for health care were put forward as a way to recover costs and discourage the excessive use of health services and the over-consumption of care. This did not happen. Instead, user fees punished the poor’. User fees, or co-pays, and payment for private health care where public health care does not exist continue to be ways to ‘punish’ the poor. India – currently the country with the third highest COVID-19 death toll – has the highest out-of-pocket medical expenses in the world.

The sharp words from the head of the nurses’ union in the United States are echoed by doctors and nurses around the world. Last year, Jhuliana Rodrigues, a nurse at the São Vicente Hospital in Jundiaí, Brazil told me that they ‘work with fear’, recounting that the conditions are appalling, the equipment minimal, and the hours long. Health professionals ‘do their jobs with love, dedication, care of human beings’, she told me. Despite all the early talk about ‘essential workers’, health workers have seen little change in their working conditions, which is why we have seen a wave of strikes across the world – such as the recent militant strike by doctors in Delhi, India.


Valery Shchekoldin (USSR), Workplace Gymnastics, 1981.



The mishandling of the COVID catastrophe in countries like the United States, Brazil, and India is a major human rights violation of treaties to which all of these countries are signatories. Each of these countries is a member of the WHO, whose Constitution, written in 1946, envisages ‘the highest attainable standard of health [as] one of the fundamental rights of every human being’. Two years later, the International Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25, asserted that ‘everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control’. The language is dated – ‘himself’, ‘his family’, ‘his’ – but the point is clear. Even if the declaration is a non-binding treaty, it sets an important standard that is routinely violated by the major world powers.

In 1978, at Alma-Ata (USSR), each of these countries pledged to enhance public health infrastructure, which they not only failed to do, but which they systematically undermined by extensively privatising health care. The evisceration of public health care systems is one reason why these capitalist states could not handle the public health crisis – a stark contrast to the states of Cuba, Kerala, and Venezuela, which were vastly more successful at breaking the chain of infection with a fraction of the resources.

Finally, in 2000, at the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, member states of the United Nations endorsed a document that affirmed that ‘health is a fundamental human right indispensable for the exercise of other human rights. Every human being is entitled to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health conducive to living a life in dignity’.

A toxic culture has emerged in many of the largest countries in the world, where there is routine disregard for the well-being of ordinary people, a disregard that violates international treaties. Words like ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ need to be rethought from the root; they are cheapened by their narrow use.

Our colleagues at New Frame started the new year with a strong editorial calling for resistance to these malign governments and for the need for a new project to restore hope. On the second point, they write:

‘There is nothing utopian about this. There are plenty of examples – all with their limits and contradictions, to be sure – of rapid social progress under progressive governments. But this always requires popular organisation and mobilisation to build a political instrument for change, to renew and discipline it from below, and to defend it from domestic elites and imperialism, most particularly the revanchism of American foreign policy, covert and overt’.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... tastrophe/

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Report: Cuba’s Lessons, Scientific Challenges During Pandemic


A total 9, 696,217 Cubans are now fully vaccinated vs Covid-19. The figure represents 86.7 percent of the country's entire population (approximately 11 million 300 thousand). | Photo: Twitter @CUBAONU

Published 7 January 2022 (10 hours 8 minutes ago)

The authors mentioned as lessons the understanding of the management of science and innovation in health emergency situations as a learning process and its impact beyond the control of the disease.

The lessons learned during the fight against Covid-19 and the process of transformation of technology and innovation were highlighted by Anales de la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, a journal whose latest issue was published on Friday.

Rolando Perez Rodriguez and Ileana Morales Suarez, director of Science and Innovation at BioCubaFarma and director of Science and Technological Innovation at the Ministry of Public Health, respectively, are the authors of the former investigation, which proposes five theses to summarize Cuba’s experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic.

With a developing economy, the results in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic are a consequence, to a large extent, of the investment made in biotechnology in the last quarter of the 20th century and in a public health system with high levels of accessibility and coverage, they revealed.


The repositioning of products registered or in the clinical development phase for other diseases allowed the introduction of novel drugs in the single action protocol against Covid-19 with a portfolio of 28 medications and supplies, including drugs, vaccines and diagnostic kits, among others.

To date, 19 products have been authorized for emergency use by the Cuban Center for State Control of Medicines, Equipment and Medical Devices (CECMED), the publication noted.

The authors mentioned as lessons the understanding of the management of science and innovation in health emergency situations as a learning process and its impact beyond the control of the disease.


The latter work, by Maria Luisa Zamora Rodriguez, from the Directorate of Scientific and Technological Potential at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment (CITMA), summarizes the changes in the sector supported by programmatic documents from the Cuban State and Government.

She exemplified how in the nine approved policies the key objectives are to promote the growth of scientific and technological potential, the connection with the economic foundation, the increase in the impact and the integration of all actors in the system, among others.

Likewise, she recommended strengthening public policies to increase investment in science, technology and innovation, and include in the statistics those categorized with lower classifications, technologists and university professors, in addition to diversifying the sources of financing.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Rep ... -0020.html

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Cuba To Finish Application Of Booster Doses By Late January

"We are accelerating production and transfer of vaccines throughout the national territory to meet this goal," President Miguel Diaz-Canel tweeted.


On Wednesday, Cuba’s Health Ministry (MINSAP) assured that the all Cuban population will have received a booster dose of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of January.

"We are accelerating production and transfer of vaccines throughout the national territory to meet this goal," President Miguel Diaz-Canel tweeted, adding that he was confident of Cuban health professionals’ capacities.

Although MINSAP initially thought to start applying booster doses five months after people were fully immunized, it decided to allow booster doses vaccination three months after the last vaccine to prevent Omicron strain contagions.

Reinforcement vaccination in Cuba is being carried out in a phased manner, which prioritizes the most vulnerable population groups. The process started with health and BioCubaFarma professionals. Subsequently, it continued with tourism workers, border patrol agents, and citizens with co-morbidities and finally comprised the rest of the population.


So far, over 10,400 Cubans have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine, 91 percent of the population have been fully immunized against the disease, and 2 million citizens have gotten a booster dose.

According to the Our World in Data Oxford University website, Cuba is the second country with the highest full and partial immunization-related statistics, only surpassed by the United Arab Emirates.

As of January 5, this Latin American country had reported 969,138 COVID-19 cases and 8,324 related deaths.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Cub ... -0010.html

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Xi’an’s Covid response: Preserving human life is preserving freedom

This article by Keith Lamb, originally published in CGTN, counters the Western media’s critique of China’s Zero Covid strategy and of the comprehensive virus suppression measures currently being enforced in the city of Xi’an. The author points out that the Covid death rate in the US has been almost a thousand times as high as in China; on that basis it would surely be appropriate to learn from China’s experience and to cooperate with it in tackling the pandemic.

With the total number of new COVID-19 cases since December 9 reaching 1,573 in Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi Province, local and central government, backed by voluntary citizen support, are doing everything in their power to extinguish the epidemic. China’s Vice Premier Sun Chunlan has advocated for decisive and resolute measures to curb the outbreak, and, in response, the local government has backed up her words with concrete action.

With all of Xi’an’s approximately 13 million residents under lockdown, supply chains have been kept efficient to ensure that essential items such as food and medicine are available to all, especially those in need. Ten medical teams and a 24-hour hotline provide treatment to those isolated. Donations of food and supplies are not just pouring in from neighboring local governments but private citizens too.

In an attempt to belittle China’s responsible actions, some Western media have called the measures “severe” and “harsh.” One would think from a recent New York Times article that China’s actions are sheer lunacy considering it says that “China, … is virtually the last country still trying to eliminate the virus rather than live with it.” The article goes on to say that other countries have abandoned “hard lockdowns, believing their economic and human costs to be too great.”

Considering China has had no COVID-19 deaths for months, how can one be so negative about China’s efforts? Indeed, looking at statistics since the outbreak of COVID-19, China’s swift and resolute measures in Wuhan and the rest of China saved lives. Looking at deaths per million, China’s rate at just three remains one of the lowest in the world, standing in 208th place out of a total of 224 countries.

Given that China is home to the largest population and has some of the densest urban populations in the world, this figure is remarkable. If one were to look at countries that have fared better than China, they would find they are mostly remote Pacific states with small populations.

In contrast, the U.S.’s death rate per million stands at an atrocious 2,537, giving it the ignoble position of 21st in the world standings. Reports of China’s “harsh” and “severe” measures merely act as propaganda to muddy the image of China’s governing system for the Western reader, who is expected to accept high death tolls as the “price for freedom.” While Westerners do value individual freedom over collective action, it could be that this propaganda, which disparages China’s governing system, covers up inadequacies in Western liberal democracies.

First, the laissez-faire measures taken in the U.S. may reflect that its logistical system, under government command, while being adequate for far-off wars, may not be capable of keeping communities functioning in a lockdown. That is to say, the laissez-faire measures weren’t a choice because there was, in fact, no other way.

Second, the U.S. often resorted to the excuse that market forces would be disrupted as its reason for not enforcing “severe” measures. This then beggars the question of who is in the driving seat of the U.S. government, the forces of capital or the democratic will of the people?

Whatever the case may be, China’s stricter measures have led to relatively positive economic results in the end. The BBC reported that China’s economy grew a record of 18.3 percent in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same quarter in 2020. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 6.5 percent. The simple fact is people are the basis of the economy and preserving human life is preserving freedom.

With the Winter Olympics to start in February, China is responsible for not only its citizens but also the foreign visitors and athletes that will be arriving. Home to the Terracotta Warriors, Xi’an is both a tourist and an economic hub, attracting large numbers of people. Therefore, such a laisses-faire attitude would lead to COVID-19 spreading far and wide, threatening the health of the entire nation and risking the cancellation of the Olympic Games.

Imagine if China followed the U.S. approach and those attending the Olympic Games were put in peril? Certainly, the Western press would have a field day demonizing China which is, unfortunately, “damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.” Considering, in New York, 110,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19 since Christmas day alone, those in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones.

Instead, we should acknowledge that we share a common enemy in an unseen virus and come together in solidarity, learning from everyone, including China, which has grown its economy while preserving human life.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/03/x ... g-freedom/

[blindpig]

Fighting Covid Together

It is often said that “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members,” a quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Nothing has brought that measure to the forefront like the two years of the Coronavirus pandemic.



In an unusual circumstance, a catastrophe borne by all simultaneously tests every country’s healthcare system, every country’s ability to respond effectively to an unexpected challenge.



The Coronavirus punishes those countries that lack a commitment to preparedness, execution, and relief. It inflicts great pain on those societies that tolerate or encourage inequality. It ravages the populations that stress individualism or individual responsibility over collectivism and social responsibility.



Universal, publicly funded, publicly guaranteed, and publicly administered health solutions fare far better than private, semi-private, or public-private schemes.



The bastion of private solutions, “efficiency,” and individual responsibility-- the US-- wins the failed-approach-with-the-most-deadly-consequences competition hands down, besting all countries in late, insufficient, and botched response.



Conventional wisdom among the television gasbags was that the US catastrophe was the fault of the arrogant, ignorant President Trump. But now with another year of record-setting infections and deaths under the Biden Administration, that explanation falls away. The problem is systemic, though no one in the US political industry will acknowledge that it is inherent to the US healthcare model.



The facts are incontrovertible: On Thursday, December 30 Worldometer confirmed US infections totaled 572,029 for the day– a new record– and 1584 deaths on the same day. More infections occurred in the US than any other country for that day and for the duration of the pandemic to date (55,252,823). More deaths (846,189) have been reported in the US due to Covid than any other country. Happy New Year!



Far more deaths have happened from the Covid infection than combat deaths in all the wars fought by the US since 1775. This singular “achievement” has been accomplished in only two years. There are no cries of “USA, USA!”, as were in other cases of US pride.



Other countries that follow the US model showed similar “victories” in the Covid wars. Poland, a US ally engaging a similar employer-based, private insurance system, incurred 14,319 new cases and 710 deaths on December 30. Another country, Colombia, a US ally incorporating private insurance and individual responsibility in its healthcare system, has amassed 5,147,039 total cases and 129,901 deaths.



Compare these numbers to countries that have a robust public health sector, with a focus on identification, isolation, contact tracing, and selective, but thorough lockdowns. Unlike the US and its allies who rely upon individual responsibility, some countries have robust public health systems and a deep-seated identification with and duty to others.



China (PRC), for example, despite being the most populous country in the world, had 4636 new cases on December 30 and no deaths. In total, PRC has far fewer total deaths from Covid than the US has in a week. Japan has fewer total deaths than the US has in a month. And Taiwan has far fewer total deaths than the US has in a day.



A poor country like Nicaragua, limited by US sanctions, has only 17,487 total cases and 212 deaths through December 30, 2021.



All share a reliance upon a public healthcare approach, renouncing a dependence solely on vaccines and individual choices. They all approach the terror of Covid as a social issue not to be solved by private, profit-driven solutions and a state leaving the key decisions to individuals and their own self-interest. Instead, they call on the people’s highest values-- cooperation.



Heroic Cuba has mounted a national campaign against Covid, despite the barbarous blockade and scarce resources, developing its own domestically developed vaccines and offering them to other countries.



While these approaches embody what might be called “socialist values,” they need not be limited to socialist-oriented countries, as Japan and Taiwan demonstrate. An effective war against Covid can be waged by countries that embrace a healthcare system that cleanses private profit from the task of protecting public health and ensuring equal, universal benefits.



In other words, an effective approach to Covid can be reached as a reform under capitalism, but not without a radical shift in the political landscape away from the notion that the private sector has all of the answers. Only lacking is the political will.



Yet there are compelling reasons to go further than healthcare reform. The pharmaceutical industry has a stranglehold over the efforts to win the war against Covid. Pfizer and Moderna have made over $35 billion in vaccine sales for the first nine months of 2021 and are projected to sell more than $52 billion in 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal. The same article, documents the “high stakes legal battle [that] is taking shape over lucrative patent rights for Covid-19 vaccines, with drug companies pitted against each other and government and academic scientists over who invented what.”



As is typical with drug research, public institutions and scientists research, develop, often do everything short of manufacture and market new drugs, while big pharma acquires patents or licenses to sell. “Patents are especially valuable in the pharmaceutical industry because they can give a company the exclusive right to sell a drug or vaccine for many years, free from generic competition.” Academic and government scientists sell licenses for a pittance and pharmaceuticals exercise the monopoly price-gouging all too familiar to anyone utilizing the US healthcare system.



In the matter of the Covid vaccine development, the role of government scientists and the National Institute of Health is being disputed by the drug companies. One expert claims that with the dispute, “tens of billions of dollars are on the line.” In a separate case, “Moderna could be on the hook to pay more than $1 billion to the government for infringing the patent.”



At a time when people are asked to risk their lives, to sacrifice in the battle against Covid, big pharma is carving the vaccine’s destiny to fit its profit model, extracting the last dollars from the vaccine’s development process, denying its partner, the US government, even a token.



As reported by Common Dreams, a group of Texas researchers have pointed the way ahead by developing and offering an open-source alternative to the corporate vaccines. “We're not trying to make money,” Peter Hotez, who led the Texas Children's Hospital team, told The Washington Post. “We just want to see people get vaccinated.” Implicit in his statement is a ringing indictment of the big pharma approach.



With US politicians clearly unwilling to rein in or reform the rapacious, big-donor pharmaceutical industry, it is time the people insist that it be nationalized. Since it cannot be tamed, it must be euthanized. Public ownership!



Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

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NYSNA healthcare workers at Jacobi Medical Center. (Source: Sean Petty)

COVID, capitalism, and collapse: A roundtable discussion with NYC nurses and teachers
Originally published: Strikewave by Chris Brooks (January 2, 2022 ) | - Posted Jan 11, 2022

The United States has averaged a thousand people a day dying from COVID since August and the total number of lives lost is approaching a million. The number of children hospitalized with COVID has hit an all-time high nationally. During all of that, the rich have only gotten richer. On the same day we set a new national record for COVID cases, Wall Street hit a record high.

Labor journalist and NewsGuild organizer Chris Brooks sat down with a group of New York City nurses and teachers to talk about how the institutions they work for are collapsing and what labor activists can do about it.

Jia Lee, special education teacher at a public school in Manhattan, United Federation of Teachers (UFT) chapter leader and on the steering committee of the Movement for Rank-and-file Educators (MORE).

Kelley Cabrera-Adler, nurse in the adult emergency department at Jacobi Medical Center, a public hospital in the Bronx, and president of the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) bargaining unit at their hospital.

Kevin Prosen, middle school teacher in Queens, UFT delegate and member of MORE.

Sean Petty, pediatric emergency room nurse and vice president of the NYSNA bargaining unit at Jacobi Medical Center.

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Chris: Even before the pandemic hit we were facing a crisis in both education and healthcare stemming from critical understaffing and grossly deficient funding. These systemic problems were front and center in union fights around nurse-to-patient ratios and class size. Now these systems are collapsing as workers exit these industries in droves. How have you experienced this systemic collapse?

Kevin: Public schools don’t just educate children, they fill in all of the gaps of the American welfare state. When schools collapse, it’s a crisis in how we care for children and their families. Since schools play this fundamental role in our social safety net, when they close down it creates cascading problems everywhere, especially the economy. That’s why there has been an unrelenting push to keep schools open no matter what. The U.S. is now seeing the highest COVID cases of any point in the pandemic and all the advice we’ve been given about masks, distancing and quarantining over the past two years has suddenly gone out the window. The message is: the government is done doing anything substantive to stop the spread of COVID. So of course, every teacher is asking themselves: do I really want to keep doing this? So now schools can barely stay open because so many teachers have quit, are out sick, or are too afraid to come back. It feels like the city government has effectively driven the car into a wall and their solution is to just step on the gas.

Jia: Going into the 2020-2021 school year, we saw a bottom-up call from NYC teachers to keep the schools closed and maintain a remote option. I’m an elementary school teacher and what ended up happening was elementary schools were forced to open and the middle and high schools were told they could remain remote. That caused a lot of division. The general feeling in elementary schools was ‘Well, if we’re not going to look out for each other, then you know what, this is not for me.’ So there were mass resignations. Fast forward to now, COVID is spreading everywhere, and we are being told, ‘if you are vaccinated and the children are vaccinated, you don’t need to quarantine.’ This total indifference to the health and safety of teachers and students isn’t going unnoticed. There was already a teacher shortage, and now we are seeing real declines in enrollment at teacher colleges as things have continued to only get worse. Unless we unite across our union and step up our fight for our profession and for public education, everything is just going to continue getting worse.

Kelley: I’ve spent the last two years thinking things can’t get worse and then they somehow do. Yesterday was worse than any day I had in March and April of 2020. I would never want to return to those days in 2020, but at least then there was a shutdown. There were no car accidents, stabbings, or gunshots. Asthma went way down. We were largely just dealing with COVID. Now we have COVID layered on top of everything else. And I’m a direct witness to what happens when kids test positive and keep coming to school. Our ER is filling up with both teachers and students. It’s obvious that what happens in education affects what happens in healthcare and both are at the mercy of these deeper systemic failures.

We are two years into the pandemic and there is still a testing shortage. Twenty City MD locations have closed so they can maintain a bare bones staff at their remaining locations. Lines for testing centers run on for blocks and blocks. The failure to provide adequate care where it is needed leads to increased reliance on the one place that everyone knows they can turn to if they are desperate: the emergency room. Our hospital has a public testing center and the line is so crazy that people give up and just come to the ER to get tested. In the ER, it’s still a five hour wait.

The acuity is really high in the Bronx and the pandemic has only made it worse. Everyone we see in the ER is now sicker than they were a few years ago, because fewer people have access to the medications they need, many have lost their jobs and health insurance and hold off on getting care until it’s an emergency. The baseline for everything we see is getting worse while the system continues to be flooded with COVID patients and nurses are quitting.


NYSNA nurses protesting outside of the Jacobi Medical Center. (Source: Kelley Cabrera-Adler)

Sean: Nurses and teachers are two of the largest job titles in this country and our jobs put us in some of the highest risk of exposure to this virus. Most of our time is spent interacting with potentially infected people. We’ve been asked to risk our lives on a daily basis over the last two years, through wave after wave, while at the same time we’ve seen all of these terrible policies, first under Trump and now under Biden, being enacted. Epidemiologists kept warning that failure to vaccinate everyone around the globe would just lead to more mutations. Delta and Omicron are both highly predictable situations. Politicians and employers have tried desperately to coax everyone into a false sense of security after each wave of this virus subsidies. Then they all—not just Biden, but deBlasio and soon to be Adams, Cuomo and now Hochul—act shocked when it mutates and comes back when we failed to do what was needed to keep that from happening. So I think it’s just becoming increasingly clear to everyone that the ruling elite are making a conscious choice to prioritize the profit-driven economy over our lives. They are making that choice everyday by refusing to make vaccines universally available around the globe, refusing to mass manufacture tests, refusing to isolate and quarantine infected workers, and refusing to provide N95 masks to the public. Instead they are telling everyone: you have to go to work. And what we are seeing is that nurses, teachers, and tons of other workers are choosing to quit instead.

Chris: New York City is the largest school system in the country. What happens here reverberates across school systems everywhere. Recently, de Blasio, Hochul and Adams held a press conference to announce the school system’s new “test to stay” policy. Hochul called remote learning a, “failed experiment,” and essentially said the goal is to keep schools open no matter what. What do you think of the city’s plan?

Jia: There are two parts to this plan. The first is surveillance testing of random groups of students to try and catch the virus before there is an outbreak. The city plans to increase the number of students tested weekly at each school from 10 to 20 percent. But 20% is still far too low. When outbreaks happen, they happen fast. Epidemiologists have been clear that this will not prevent outbreaks. The second part of the plan is contact tracing and testing students who were in “close proximity” to an infected person. This has been a complete failure.

If there is a positive case in my classroom, then the principal has to report it to the Situation Room, which is the Public Health Department’s call-in site for contact tracing in NYC public schools. The Situation Room is then responsible for following up with the infected student, figuring out who they were in three-feet of throughout the day, getting the contact information for those students and then contacting them. The three foot rule has no basis in science, it’s solely intended to limit the number of students who need to quarantine until they are tested. However, the Situation Room is still so overwhelmed by the number of positive cases they cannot keep up. They are telling principals they will get back with them in five to seven days. So what actually happens is teachers send principals a list of names to contact trace and the principals reach out to them.

As if that wasn’t enough, rapid tests are proving to be less effective detecting Omicron. That was my personal experience. I have COVID right now and am very sick. And like many people, I tested negative on a rapid test and positive on a PCR test. So how are we going to prevent outbreaks of a mutated virus that is now capable of alluding our rapid tests? There is no plan for that.

Kevin: This policy is just theater. We can’t even actually test 20% of students in our school because we can only administer tests to students whose parents formally consent to the testing program. Currently, less than a quarter of K-12 students in New York City schools have provided a consent form. Also, there is no random testing of staff.

Hochul’s claim that remote learning is being avoided is laughable. Teachers are covering multiple classes at once because so many other teachers are sick or quarantined. Over half of my kids in all of my classes are at home, so learning is still remote for them. So the school system is a Potemkin village. The doors are literally “open,” someone comes and unlocks them every morning, but they are completely collapsing.

Chris: Why don’t we just mandate vaccinations for students that are five and older?

Kevin: Students should not be allowed to enter a school building without proof of vaccination and without completing a consent-to-test form. The only reason that has not happened is because the leaders in our city have totally surrendered to medical libertarianism. Right now, in public schools, students are required to be vaccinated for everything except COVID, the one thing that’s spreading like wildfire in the city.

Sean: As a pediatric emergency room nurse, mandating vaccines and testing for students is a no-brainer. But I also think it’s important to point out that both the Trump and Biden administrations have avoided a comprehensive approach to managing the pandemic and instead focus solely on vaccination. Vaccination is a crucial part of addressing COVID, but a vaccination-only policy is going to fail. There has to be mass testing and contact tracing, universal access to high-filtration masks, strong ventilation and filtration systems in buildings, and remote work.

Kelley: Obviously vaccines should be prioritized, we need universal vaccination, but that can and should happen in conjunction with building all the other pieces of a strong public health infrastructure. Every day I have patients who are vaccinated and did not know that they can still get COVID. They think the vaccine didn’t work, which is not true. The vaccine is protecting them from dying. But that reflects how badly the CDC has failed in informing the public. That failure combined with incoherent and dangerous guidance—like recommending that nurses wear bandanas at the start of the pandemic—has only helped to fuel conspiracy theories.

Chris: That brings us to the CDC’s most recent guidance, which reduced the time an infected vaccinated person needs to be quarantined from ten to five days with no testing requirement to return to work. Not only do you not have to test, but the CDC and Fauci are explicitly saying that if after five days you are still shedding enough of the virus to test positive on a rapid test, then you should still return to work. So on the one hand, city officials are saying ‘tests are great and we should use them to keep schools open,’ while on the other the CDC is saying ‘tests don’t matter, just get to work,’ and Omicron is possibly even bypassing rapid tests. How does the public not lose trust in these institutions and these leaders?

Jia: Contradictory policies are what happens when you prioritize not disrupting the economy over doing what is needed to save lives. This way business can continue as usual and there is no enhanced unemployment, no guaranteed sick leave, no rent relief, and no student loan relief. When everything shut down, everyone was in the same boat and suddenly we saw what was possible when all of our country’s wealth was redirected towards meeting our collective needs.

Kevin: What the government has done is pull out all the supports that were in the place with one hand while pushing people back into the workplace to risk their health and safety with the other. The CDC and Fauci have merged labor discipline with public health policy.

Kelley: Currently, the CDC says if you are vaccinated and exposed to a confirmed case of Covid you should just keep going to work. The CDC advises the public against high filtration masks such as N95s. The CDC has not updated the definition of “fully vaccinated” to include booster shots. Employers are happy to trumpet that they are following CDC guidelines because they are so insufficient and require so little. At this point, I don’t know any nurses who will stand up for CDC guidelines. It’s clear that their intent is not to protect the public’s health, it’s just to get people back to work. Their policy is now to literally work sick. It’s out there in the open.

Chris: The House of Labor does not appear to have a vision for getting us out of the pandemic that is clear and distinct from that of the Democrats and the bosses. What is the pandemic response that the labor movement should be uniting behind and fighting for?

Kevin: [UFT president] Michael Mulgrew’s response to New York City’s new testing plan was, ‘this sounds great.’ There was a long profile of Randi Weingarten in the New York Times talking about how she’s a champion of keeping schools open in the pandemic. So the response from our union’s leadership has been nonexistent. This crisis should result in labor putting ambitious, transformative demands on the table. But if we are waiting for union leadership to do it, it is not going to happen.

Jia: Like me, many members see our union leadership as another arm of the government. That mistrust could be an opportunity to band together in our union and across unions to transform our own locals from the bottom-up. We can’t unite and fight and fight for a shared vision without first putting an end to bureaucratic business unionism that functions as an arm of the bosses. That means building dissident caucus and uniting together the Labor Notes wing of the labor movement.

Kelley: Winning anything is going to require that we reclaim the power of the strike. To do that we have to eliminate the martyrdom complex in nursing and education, both of which are female dominated professions. Concern for kids and patients is weaponized by the bosses to keep us from being able to effectively fight. The more patients that a nurse has, statistically, the more likely those patients are to die. That is a fact. The hospital and policy makers know this. Rather than doing what we need to fund our health system so we can hire and retain more nurses, employers choose to manipulate us. “You should come work an extra shift because we don’t have enough nurses. Come help your colleagues. Your patients need you.” On top of that, we have the Taylor Law, which makes unions afraid to strike. All of that might make striking difficult and stressful in the short term, but nothing will change in the long term if we aren’t willing to take risks and be more militant.

Sean: We need to train hundreds-of-thousands of more healthcare and education workers in this country to stem current shortfalls, but nothing is happening that is close to the scale that is needed. So I agree with Kelley and would add that we need a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ mentality when it comes to workplace fights. The New Deal came on the heels of massive strike waves in our country, including three general strikes. It’s not clear that every action is going to be successful, but we have to start being bold enough to act and we have to start coordinating those actions together across unions and across industries through networks like Labor Notes and DSA. The demands are the easy part, but first we need to cohere the anger and desperation that exists out there into action.

Chris: It’s worrying to see a growing chorus on the Left starting to carry the boss’s water when discussing how we should be responding to the pandemic by using the logic of individual risk assessment rather than focusing on the common good. People are arguing, ‘you’re boosted, your risks are really low as it is, you just need to go about living your life, everyone is going to get it.’ What do you have to say to people on the Left who are starting to cave to COVID fatigue?

Jia: I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the Black Lives Matter movement, which I think has really elevated public understanding of systemic racism and the need to break down white supremacy at the institutional level. In both the Water Is Life and BLM movements, we see how struggles can be rooted in a vision of communities as spaces where we take care of each other. We also see that when teachers center their strikes around the schools our students deserve. Community care as a source of struggle runs counter to the culture of individualism in the United States.

Kevin: There is an unwillingness to confront reality because a systemic collapse can only be averted by systemic change and many don’t think that’s possible. Absent the hope of collective action, all people are left with is individualism. If you don’t see a way to stop the pandemic, then the default is to just vaccinate yourself and hope for the best. It’s also not hard to see how if you can’t punch up at the people who are making the policy choices that have resulted in hundreds-of-thousands of deaths, you instead start to fixate on scolding the unvaccinated or people who don’t wear masks properly. We start projecting our anger and insecurity on to people with no power.

Kelley: People can try to put their heads down and pretend that what is happening won’t affect them, but at some point everyone is going to have to go to the hospital. Our families and friends will have to go to the hospital. And then you will be reliant on a system that has completely broken down. We can’t just cede ground to the rightwing by not acknowledging reality and refusing to address it collectively.

Sean: It is connected to powerlessness. If we don’t have a movement powerful enough to go up against the health insurance industry, then Medicare for All drops off the table. We aren’t strong enough to take on the fossil fuel industry, so climate change is just overwhelming. The same is true for the pandemic and COVID response. But we’ve all seen how movements can rapidly build enough power to center working class voices and demands in national discussions. That is exactly what happened in April 2020, when rank-and-file nurses in NYC were leading a national fight to demand PPE be prioritized over hospital profits. We took actions across our hospitals and suddenly everybody wanted to know what we had to say. Kelley was on 60 minutes. We can reach that moment again, but staving off collapse and winning a transformative political agenda starts with organizing in the workplace.

https://mronline.org/2022/01/11/covid-c ... -teachers/

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Covid Fueled by Neoliberal Austerity
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 05 Jan 2022


Covid test distribution in Brooklyn, New York Photo: New York Post, Getty Images

The neo-liberal austerity model of governance ensures that Covid-19 will continue spreading and producing new variants. Only people focused public health remedies will end the pandemic.

On December 31, 2019 Chinese media told the world about a newly discovered disease cluster in the city of Wuhan. What was thought to be a viral pneumonia came to be known as SARS-CoV-2, Covid-19. Two weeks later Chinese scientists sequenced its genome and gave the world the ability to test and trace the disease. Covid continued to spread and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

China didn’t wait for a WHO declaration in order to take action. The government immediately adopted a zero covid strategy. They dispatched health care workers to Wuhan and built new hospitals to care for the sick. The sick were isolated and the healthy were supported in a variety of ways. They developed their own vaccine, which 90% of the population have taken. China tests millions of its people on a regular basis. The result of this effort is fewer than 5,000 deaths in a nation of 1.3 billion people. The United States, with a population of 330 million, has more than 800,000 deaths and a record-breaking number of new cases in December 2021. Of course, one society is committed to serving human needs while the other wants to do as little as possible in that regard. Serving the donor class is the political priority in the U.S. Everything else is secondary.

The United States doesn’t have a true health care system. Instead, for-profit companies run hospitals and private health insurers. Workers have health insurance only if their employers provide it, and the race to the bottom has reduced opportunities for these living wage jobs. This shaky system didn’t serve the public before the pandemic struck. The safety net is fragile and people who fell ill or who were unemployed during this crisis were on their own with little help from the federal government.

Throughout 2020 Donald Trump was the face of the covid crisis and his performance was in large part responsible for his defeat. Despite campaigning as the man who would end the pandemic, Joe Biden’s response has been even worse than Trump’s. By the time Biden came to office the nature of the problem was well known, vaccines had been developed, and a test was widely available. What hadn’t changed is the hold of the oligarchy on the political system and the resulting commitment to austerity and keeping workers on the job. The Biden administration now has the dubious distinction of presiding over the same number of deaths which occurred while Trump was in office.

Biden’s spokesperson Jen Psaki unintentionally explained why the situation is no better. In a now infamous response to a question about increasing the availability of rapid tests for at home use, she said. “Should we just send one to every American? Then what happens if every American has one test? How much does that cost and what happens after that?” The operative words were about cost.

The omicron variant had begun its spread around the world and all Biden could come up with was a plan to make tests eligible for insurance reimbursement. Health insurers are loath to pay for anything because profit maximization is their goal. There is little reason to believe that these same corporations would act against their interests and suddenly become altruistic in a time of need.

But big money is still in control and they have direct access to the president who promised them that nothing would fundamentally change. When the CEO of Delta Airlines asked to reduce the number of days that employees could end infection isolation from ten days down to five, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) did just that. Most physicians and scientists vehemently opposed the decision, but big business said jump and the white house asked, “How high?” Delta’s lobbying success was immediately followed by a cut in paid sick leave for its employees with covid.

In 2020 the campaign against Trump and his mishandling was the centerpiece of Biden’s campaign. He said he would, “Trust the science,” but when scientists made recommendations that might have reduced the spread of covid he ignored them. It is Biden’s CDC that declared vaccinated people didn’t have to wear masks and thus precipitated the spread of the delta variant.

It was recently revealed that in October 2021 a group of researchers proposed what they called A Testing Surge to Prevent a Holiday COVID Surge . Their plan was simple. The federal government should produce and distribute 732 million free test kits per month. But the idea was rejected because of a “lack of capacity.” Of course the real problem was just what spokeswoman Psaki said out loud. There was never an intention of using federal resources to benefit the people.

Fortunately the omicron variant appears to be less dangerous. Yet milder symptoms do little good in a country which doesn’t help its people. Test kits sold commercially are often out of stock, testing facilities are crowded and people line up for hours to be tested only to face a long wait for results. There are so many new infections that even a “mild” variant has created chaos with illnesses among health care workers and flight crews.

The reliance on a vaccine only strategy has led to this situation. When it became clear that “breakthrough” infections could occur after vaccination, the CDC announced that it would limit tracking of breakthroughs to those cases which required hospitalization. The decision was an admission that a course correction was needed. Instead the Biden team doubled down on failure and began forcing federal agencies and contractors, which means most private companies, to vaccinate employees whether they wanted it or not.

The only certainty is that a virus continues to mutate when it spreads. The spread can be stopped if sick people are paid to stay at home, testing is easily accessible, high quality masks are free and in ample supply, and ventilation is improved indoors. Reliance on vaccination alone has been a failure all over the world. For now the vaccinated are still far less likely to need hospitalization or to die. But that protection can end with a future variant.

The WHO has warned that continued spread will lead to a variant that responds to none of the vaccines or treatments. Already the “mild” omicron can be treated with only one of three approved monoclonal antibody formulas. Of course the sole effective treatment is now in very short supply . The next mutation may create a variant that can’t be treated at all.

Biden wants to keep people at work and make big business happy, just as Trump did. The focus on the corporate bottom line makes life precarious during a pandemic. Of course precarity is the goal. Keeping the public vulnerable and afraid is a feature of the system.

The logic of reliance on vaccination was simple. Big pharma got millions of dollars in public funds, and the federal government didn’t have to do anything else. Of course there should have been ongoing support instead of small stimulus payments and a temporary child tax credit. This moment calls for huge expenditures and not nickel and diming about test kits. The ongoing battle over Build Back Better proves that the oligarchy are in no mood for more spending when that is just what the situation calls for.

Americans are alternately afraid or fatalistic, succumbing to the belief that everyone will get covid. Resignation is to be expected when the people responsible for social well being fail so miserably. While China and Cuba freely share vaccines around the world the United States has nothing to offer except more misery. Biden told a group of governors that the covid crisis was a state responsibility. Having made a crisis worse, he seeks to wash his hands of the situation of his own making.

There is no covid miracle coming and none is necessary. Just consistent testing, allowing the sick to stay home, improving indoor air quality, providing access to the best masks, and using vaccines as one piece of the puzzle. Of course all of these things should be free and under public control. On the other hand, caring for the needs of the people would indeed be miraculous in the country of which it was once said, “The business of America is business.”

https://www.blackagendareport.com/covid ... -austerity

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While Boston schools rage with COVID, teachers union demands better for students and staff
Liberation StaffJanuary 10, 2022

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Boston Public Schools returned to in-person learning on Jan. 4 amid the Omicron surge of COVID-19 with negligible safety measures in place for students and staff. In response, the Boston Teachers Union is demanding medical-grade KN95 masks for all students and staff, and that remote learning days count towards required instruction.

The BTU is also demanding modern HVAC in all new school buildings, faster responses to work orders, established air quality standards, a ban on evictions of BPS students during the school year, requiring developers to consult with school site councils and turning unused spaces into housing.

The Boston Globe reported that over 1,000 staff members and 30% of students in BPS were out on the day of reopening. Schools scrambled to find coverage for classes in order to adapt to the amount of absences. “Everybody is getting sick and it’s not safe to be in-person right now,” JD, a teacher who asked to be identified by first name only, told Liberation News.



“One of the very first things a student asked me was if I heard there are hundreds of teachers and staff out today across the district. Multiple students also asked me why they can’t go back to remote learning. And many expressed a sense of concern, frustration and even dread at being back in-person given what’s happening.”

‘It feels like a lose-lose situation‘

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education sent inadequate “non-medical” KN95 masks to teachers across Massachusetts. Other educators reported being provided expired rapid tests, leaving many staff responsible to find and buy their own.

DESE officials argue “returning all students to the classroom full-time this school year is a crucial step to stem student learning loss,” but the lack of a remote option and a 30% absence rate makes any meaningful learning difficult. Educators cannot move forward with new curriculum content while a third of their students are out of the classroom. The many students required to quarantine have no learning opportunity either, because of DESE’s blanket ban on remote learning.

These challenges compound on an already difficult year. A school counselor in Somerville who asked not to be identified noted that absences and behavioral challenges are spiking. “Last week we had about 400 students absent, out of about 1,300. Aside from the testing lines, it’s a ghost town.



“It feels like a lose-lose situation. Many of my students already face serious financial, language, and legal barriers. When schools were remote, many started working to help pay the bills. Some had to share a single computer with two or three siblings to attend their Zoom classes. If computers were provided and bills were covered, it might be a different story. The transition back hasn’t been easy… being in-person right now is scary.”

Boston Teacher’s Union ‘Common Good’ demands

Educators and public schools have struggled to support students with trauma for decades, but the pandemic has highlighted the need for effective social-emotional services. The Boston Teachers Union is advocating for more counselors, social workers, and school psychiatrists in their new contract package.

The BTU is also pushing the state to address the crumbling infrastructure of many school buildings. Outdated buildings have been a problem for years, but the issue is magnified during an airborne pandemic. The lack of ventilation in these buildings can contribute to the spread of COVID-19. The new contract includes demands for modern HVAC in all new school buildings, faster responses to work orders and established air quality standards.



The BTU is demanding that the school committee advocates to ban evictions of BPS students during the school year. It would also require developers to consult with school site councils if they are building within a half-mile of a BPS school. Additionally, they are forming a committee dedicated to turning unused spaces into housing.

Other teachers unions across the country are demanding safety measures for their schools. Chicago Teachers Union recently voted to work remotely until their demands for in-person learning are met, including a metric for closing all schools during a surge of COVID-19. The BTU expressed their support of CTU educators, “BTU stands in solidarity with Chicago Teachers Union.”

‘We need to address the inequity that existed before the pandemic‘

Students created a petition to advocate for a remote learning option: “Forcing students to attend in-person learning simply isn’t safe. In packed conditions such as the hallway, lunchrooms, and auditoriums, and given the alarming infection rate of the new Omicron variant, schools have become a literal COVID-19 breeding ground,” wrote William Hu, a student at Boston Latin School.

[

“Forcing students to attend in-person learning simply isn’t safe.”

WILLIAM HU, BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL STUDENT

The BTU’s contract package preamble states, “Now more than ever, we need to address the inequity that existed before the pandemic and was further exacerbated over the last year and a half. With thoughtful usage of federal funds and a full implementation of the Student Opportunity Act (yet to be fully honored by the Commonwealth), we have a unique opportunity to reset the foundation for our students post pandemic and beyond.”

https://www.liberationnews.org/while-bo ... rationnews

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Chinese mainland reports 110 locally transmitted COVID-19 cases
Xinhua | Updated: 2022-01-11 11:37

BEIJING -- The Chinese mainland on Monday reported 110 new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases, the National Health Commission said in its daily report on Tuesday.

Of the new local cases, 87 were reported in Henan, 13 in Shaanxi, and 10 in Tianjin, the commission said.

Also reported were 82 new imported cases in 11 provincial-level regions, according to the commission.

No new suspected cases or deaths from COVID-19 were reported Monday, added the commission.

The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases on the mainland had reached 103,968 by Monday, including 3,458 patients still receiving treatment, of whom 21 were in severe condition.

A total of 95,874 patients had been discharged from hospitals on the mainland, and 4,636 had died as a result of the virus.

A total of 50 asymptomatic cases were newly reported Monday, 39 of whom arrived from outside the mainland.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202201/ ... 805c6.html

Just sayin'...

[blindpig]

Why must schools stay open?
Posted Jan 11, 2022 by An anonymous public school teacher

Why are U.S. schools open to start 2022, as 1 million citizens a day are testing positive for COVID?

In March of 2020, K-12 schools in the United States hastily transitioned to remote learning as COVID-19 swept across the country for the first time. In the months and years to follow, the U.S. became the world leader in COVID deaths. As of right now, more than 800,000 people have been killed by, and at least 55 million people have been infected with, COVID in the United States.1 That’s more than double the amount of infections recorded in the next most infected country of Brazil, whose president believes the pandemic is “a shameless… colossal and absurd campaign” against himself.2 The reason we are here is multifactorial. The purpose of this article is to review, in very simple terms, how the state-corporate complex has treated K-12 schools throughout the pandemic. Instead of counting cases or analyzing particular districts, we will paint with the broad brush of federal policy. Our observations lend themselves to an important conclusion, from which we can discern why U.S. schools must be open at any cost.

When schools pivoted to virtual classes in March 2020, shameful public infrastructure posed challenges for remote school children and teachers, especially in poor urban and rural communities where COVID is most likely to infect and kill people. For example, a diversity of poor students nationwide battled low bandwidth and some of the most expensive internet pricing in the so-called developed world, just for the chance to be present in class.3, 4, 5 On Tribal Lands and Reservations, where it is not profitable for private companies to sell communication services, thousands of students were unable to attend class virtually. Their experience of school was reduced to solitary assignments.6

Two months into remote learning, on May 25th, 2020, as the cumulative COVID case count in the United States was closing in on 2 million, then president Donald Trump tweeted “Schools in our country should be opened ASAP. Much very good information now available”, following former CEO Steven Hilton’s Fox Corporation broadcast.7 Most school buildings remained closed for the year as the novel coronavirus swirled.

On July 9th, 2020, in accordance with international scientific consensus, the World Health Organization acknowledged that coronavirus spreads through aerosols, especially in enclosed spaces over long periods of time “because aerosols remain suspended in the air”.8 The scientific community welcomed this development, but criticized the WHO for “saying now what we as scientists have been saying for the majority of this pandemic”.9 A few weeks later, during a summer peak of 75,000 daily COVID cases in the US, Bill Gates spoke to CNBC, a favorite channel of Wall Street, to argue that K-12 schools should reopen for the 20/21 school year because “the benefits outweigh the costs”.10 We know the costs are Human Lives lost to COVID. But what are the benefits for Bill Gates, who added 18 billion dollars to his net worth in 2020?11 Maybe they have something to do with his investments in for-profit ed-tech companies and charter schools, maybe not.12 We’ll keep that question in mind as we move further along our timeline.

In August 2020, many districts started the new school year with remote learning. In districts that returned to physical classrooms, multiple outbreaks were recorded within the first few weeks.13 Over the course of the fall semester, national positivity rates, hospitalizations, and deaths climbed day by day to all time highs, peaking in late January 2021, just as Joe Biden was inaugurated, with an average of more than 4,000 daily deaths. Riding both the descent of this record COVID wave and the ascent of Biden’s “100-day plan”, which pushed for a mass return to the classroom, the CDC released its school reopening guidelines in mid February 2021.14, 15 Right away, political and scientific commentators exposed suspect omissions in the CDC’s guide.16, 17

Most alarmingly, the words ‘aerosols’ and ‘airborne’ do not appear at all in the CDC’s documents but for paper titles in listed references. Secondarily, ‘ventilation’ appears only in a handful of ancillary sentences, whereas ‘physical distancing’, for example, headlines a whole section. Not even low tech improvements to ventilation as simple as opening classroom windows and doors were recommended in the CDCs guidelines (though they do suggest opening windows on buses). This came as a shock, because aerosols and ventilation were known to be critical factors in the spread of COVID long before the CDC’s school guidance was published.18 Teachers Unions were forced to fight for improved building ventilation systems on their own terms and individual schools and districts implemented open window requirements of their own. The CDC’s proposed prevention measures of hand washing, surface cleaning, masking, and social distancing function to stop the spread of COVID to the extent that it spreads only via droplets (particles that fall to the floor and on surfaces after coughs and sneezes) and not aerosols (airborne particles). Recall that more than 7 months earlier the World Health Organization acknowledged that COVID spreads via aerosols. As research out of MIT has shown, it is precisely because COVID spreads though aerosols that “in such well-mixed spaces [as classrooms], one is no safer from airborne pathogens at 60 ft than 6 ft”.19 Since COVID accumulates in an airspace overtime, two of the most effective ways to reduce the spread are to maximize the quality of the space’s ventilation and to minimize the amount of time people spend together in the space.20 In other words, it is impossible to eliminate the risk of COVID spreading in schools, since it is usually the case that a large number of students spend 6 or more hours together in an inadequately ventilated classroom over the course of a school day. But, because the CDC minimized aerosols and ventilation, their proposal to reopen schools appeared safe and effective.

As a result, millions of students returned to in-person learning in Spring of 2021. The CDC, which forced students and staff to frantically sanitize common objects when the risk of getting COVID from surfaces was known to be inconsequentially low 21, concertedly minimized established science in order to get students back into the classroom. Dr. Anthony Fauci himself conceded “we need to try and get the children back to school and that’s the goal of President Biden that in the next 100 days to get the K to eights back in school”.22 We now have two questions. Why does Bill Gates want schools open, and why does the federal government want schools open? If we don’t know already we only need to go a little further to find our answer.

Many districts that reopened their schools in Spring 2021 used hybrid models, where half of the students were in person and the others were projected onto a screen in the classroom. In such cases, the physical distance between students could comply with CDC guidance. Nevertheless, plenty of parents opted to keep their children at home. Teachers around the country were asked to return to the building prior to getting two doses of a vaccine, to teach virtual and in-person learners simultaneously. In March 2021, not long into hybrid learning, the CDC reduced its social distancing guidance in schools from 6 to 3 feet for children in the classroom.23 This amendment only applied to children in schools, not to the general public and not even to the teachers of these children.

While laypeople on all sides of U.S. politics found this new 3-feet-in-schools rule rather dubious (the right took it as proof that COVID posed little risk all along, and the left as proof that the CDC had ulterior motives), the corporate press aggressively marketed it. Take just one broadcaster, Jake Tapper on CNN. Earlier in February 2021 he read from a script to CDC director Rochelle Walensky:

I had high hopes that schools would be able to resume in person learning because so many scientists and health officials had been talking about the science supports opening the schools as soon as possible.24

Then, not a second after the studies suggesting 3-feet of social distance for K-12 students had emerged, Jake Tapper interviewed Dr. Fauci. Tapper manically lobbed Fauci a softball, whose arch traces the painfully obvious logic of the social distancing policy change: “But that six foot requirement, that’s one of the main hurdles to opening schools… Does this study suggest three feet is good enough?” Fauci replied “It does indeed, and that’s exactly the point I’m making.”25

Unsurprisingly, even though it quickly became clear that the new 3-feet rule was problematic in light of competing COVID variants (and again that ventilation was critical), the CDC did not backtrack.26, 27 Today, in January of 2022, they recommend “staying at least 6 feet (about 2 arm lengths) from other people” outside of schools. Why does the CDC maintain that 3 feet is safe for children in school but continue to recommend 6 feet of distance for everyone else? Because there is not enough physical space in schools to accommodate in-person learning at a reasonable social distance of 6 feet. My hypothesis is as follows. The CDC ignored aerosols and ventilation in its reopening guidelines because schools could not have transitioned from remote to hybrid learning if they hadn’t. Subsequently, the CDC reduced social distancing guidelines from 6 to 3 feet because schools could not have transitioned from hybrid to full in-person instruction if they hadn’t.

I am a teacher. The small vent that circulates air out of my classroom is in a closet. My windows only open a few inches, but the air from outside makes the classroom too cold for students, who are required to take off their coats in order to display uniforms. My classroom could not physically hold all 26 students at 6 feet of distance.

The very next month, on May 7th 2021, the CDC acknowledged the airborne transmission of COVID:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised eyebrows late last week when the organization acknowledged that COVID-19 is also an airborne illness — information that has been suggested by the scientific community for nearly a year.28

Even Donald Trump, who is scientifically incompetent, “acknowledged that the coronavirus could be transmitted through the air” in a private interview with careerist bookseller Bob Woodward on February 7th, 2020, a year before the CDC.29 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a United States Federal Agency, waited a year to formally acknowledge this eminently important scientific fact about a pandemic that had to this point killed 600,000 U.S. citizens. Why? Perhaps because by this time the transition back to full in-person schooling was well underway; districts were not going to stop cramming students back into classrooms. The CDC’s late discovery of COVID aerosols was not reflected in updated school reopening guidelines. In major districts across the country a portion of families opted to keep their students at home for the rest of the school year. Not fast enough, summer break 2021 arrived.

For a second think back one year to July 6th 2020. On this day two noteworthy things happened. President Donald Trump tweeted “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” and “the Florida Department of Education issued an emergency order requiring all schools to reopen in August, to facilitate ‘a return to Florida hitting its full economic stride.’”30 Now fast forward one year and nearly half a million COVID deaths later, to July 11th, 2021. Returning to our timeline. As the highly infectious Delta Variant was circulating through the U.S. population over the summer with increasing success , Dr. Fauci, working under President Joe Biden, told ABC that even though social distancing is something you want to pay attention to in school, “if you can’t implement [it], you should still do everything you can with testing… do everything you can to keep the in-person classes going.” “The bottom line”, he explained, “is we need to get the children back in school, in-person classes in the fall.”31, 32

The 21/22 school year started with most K-12 public schools opened for in-person classes. The White House published a press release 5 months into the school year on December 2nd, 2021, one day after the first confirmed case of the Omicron Variant in the US, subtitled “New Actions Aim to Get Americans Boosted for Even Greater Protection Against the Delta and Omicron Variants, Keep Schools and Businesses Open, and Help Quickly Respond to Surges if Needed During the Colder Months.” In the document the word ‘school’ appears 30 times, with 12 of those appearances occurring in the context of “keeping schools open”. Also in the release, the Biden Administration boasts “When the President came into office, more than half the schools in our country were closed. Today, 99 percent of schools across the country are fully open and in person” and warns “with the tools, guidance, and resources the Administration has provided, schools should not have to close due to COVID-19.”33 How could they know whether schools will be safe into the future?

On December 27th, 2021, with the U.S. day after day breaking COVID records with respect to positivity rates, cases, and hospitalizations due to Omicron, the CDC reduced the 10-day quarantine period to 5. It was immediately obvious to everyone that this change was not motivated by science. The working public heavily criticized this move in class- and anti-capitalist terms, especially on social media.34 Indeed, there is no reason the CDC’s motivation shouldn’t be obvious to everyone. Dr. Fauci plainly stated it,

that there is the danger that there will be so many people who are being isolated who are asymptotic for the full ten days that you could have a major negative impact on our ability to keep society running. So the decision was made, although it’s not completely risk free, of saying let’s get that cut in half… so that 50% of the time people can actually be out with a mask in society.

So that 50% of the time people can actually be working, he means: seeing as “the CDC’s decision [came] days after Delta Airline’s CEO sent [CDC director] Walensky a letter advocating for a shorter isolation period”.35 This time the CDC didn’t even try to hide their operative reasoning. If not for this reduced quarantine period, schools and businesses would be forced to temporarily close for a lack of workers (some have closed despite it). This is a purely economic move. Does Dr. Fauci not know that entire countries have shutdown for weeks at a time and survived?36 Why did the Pentagon, one day later on December 28th, instruct its employees to work from home through January?37 Why is max workplace occupancy set at 40% for pentagon personnel and 100% for disadvantaged school-children? The US, whose annual military budget exceeds three quarters of a trillion dollars, can surely afford to pay workers to stay home to slow the spread of Omicron. There are numerous historical and global precedents, but even if there were not, it’d be a reasonable expectation.

I’m writing this on January 3rd, 2022, to start the new year. I’m writing after teaching a full day in-person with a co-teacher whose whole household is COVID positive, but whose single state supplied at-home rapid test read negative on Sunday; after covering a lunch period – in which students eat together unmasked in their classroom – for an immunocompromised teacher who quit before winter break; after teaching less than half of my students in-person, because some are out with COVID and others have immediate family members who are sick, at risk of severe illness, or just concerned for theirs and their child’s safety (I’m editing this on January 4th, after teaching a further reduced class because one of yesterday’s in-person students tested positive for COVID). Students were greeted this morning after winter break to even stricter COVID rules surrounding masking, distancing, walking, talking, and playing in PE and at recess. These restrictions can’t be easy for children, who at home can at least eat, talk, and walk around with some degree of freedom. One student responded to the Principal’s morning message, after eating a silent unmasked breakfast in the classroom, “If you are actually concerned for our safety why don’t we just do remote?” Another said they were afraid to be in-person because of COVID. An unvaccinated and infected parent asked for a week’s worth of work for their unvaccinated and infected child. There are students who attend daily healthcare appointments for their sick caretakers, who may be on dialysis, may have suffered a recent stroke, or may be otherwise debilitated. At dismissal students are sent home with their grandparents. These are true statements, not listed for dramatic effect. I’m personally fortunate to go home to healthy family members. I appreciate however, just how terrible COVID can be for students and staff, especially when there is a low rate of vaccination among them and in their community. Not to mention the rising rates of child hospitalizations.38

On January 1, 2022, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona reaffirmed the position of the U.S. Government “We’ve been very clear: Our expectation is for schools to be open full-time for students for in-person learning”.39 In harmony, red and blue state governors publicly declared that their school districts will remain open for in-person learning this winter at all costs.40 Democrat governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, even passed a law that allows the state to use non-teaching staff as substitutes for the rest of the year.41 Meanwhile, K-12 schools in Denmark and Canada, countries with significantly higher rates of vaccination and lower per capita case counts, have temporarily shifted to remote learning. Because a small number of schools in the United States have had to go remote, Secretary Cardona was forced to clarify that

any decisions on very short-term or emergency closures are most likely based off of staffing issues, and ultimately those are safety issues when you don’t have adequate staff, but the goal is full time in-person learning for our students.

“They’ve suffered enough”, he adds.

By January 3, 2022, the U.S. will surpass 1 million daily COVID infections. About 80% of the nation’s ICU beds will be occupied amid unprecedented hospital staff shortages.42 Cases will continue to rise.

I’m not convinced schools are truly safe for students right now, but I can conceive of the possible world, which may or may not be actual, in which they are safer than homes. Admittedly, I have been surprised by the low number of cases that could be traced between students in my class. Except, it’s hard to know who has it and where they got it from. Quite possibly the incalculable detriments of remote school, ranging from hunger and domestic abuse to social isolation and learning loss, outweigh the risks of COVID for students and their immediate families. (Although, I don’t know what ‘learning loss’ ultimately means, as popular as the phrase is. Merely lower test scores?) And sure, vaccines are reassuringly effective at preventing severe disease for now, but many U.S. families, who, by the way, were taught science in our all-of-the-sudden preeminently revered K-12 U.S. classrooms, are unvaccinated. It is also the case that for thousands of students in this country remote school is safer, and not just from COVID. As public buildings such as schools deteriorate, occupants risk exposure to dangerous chemicals, carcinogens, air and water pollutants, such as lead in drinking fountains and PCBs in florescent lights.43, 44, 45 Relatedly, more non-white than white parents prefer remote learning for their children.46 I’d wager that this statistic has to do with their relatively higher risk of contracting, being hospitalized with, and dying from, COVID-19.

The World Socialist Website and Teachers Unions have tracked the problems of COVID in the classroom since the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S. Most recently, the Chicago Teachers Union has fought for a 2 week period of remote work to begin the new year. It would be very hard to argue that a short, 2 weeks of remote learning, while Omicron reaches its infectious peak, would cost students more than it would benefit them.

Throughout the pandemic, it has not been an easy problem, whether to keep schools open or to hold classes virtually. There are merits and demerits to both sides. My unqualified survey of the science puts my analysis at risk, which is why I refrain from discussing it here. Maybe the CDC stands on sturdy epidemiological ground. But they should not be motivated by politics or economics to any degree. Some problems are easy. For instance, whether to carefully explain to the tens of millions of stakeholders that the risk of contracting COVID in a classroom may not be insignificant. In my estimation the CDC has failed to solve this professional and moral problem. Instead, the U.S. government has dishonestly assured us that classrooms are safe in order to open, and keep open, schools. But why?

To the extent we can argue that one, the CDC ignored aerosols and ventilation in its reopening guidelines because schools could not have transitioned from remote to hybrid learning if they hadn’t; two, the CDC reduced physical distancing guidelines from 6 to 3 feet because schools could not have transitioned from hybrid to full in-person instruction if they hadn’t; and three, the CDC reduced the quarantine period to 5 days so schools (and other places of work) would not be forced to temporarily close for a lack of laborers; we can say that the CDC wants to keep schools open. This brings us back to our two questions. Why does Bill Gates, who stands in for an owning class that has advocated for relaxed COVID measures throughout the pandemic despite making record profits on their investments this year and last, want schools open? And, why does the federal government want schools open? The answer, I think, is that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, like most federal institutions in the United States, serves corporate power. This is an increasingly popular sentiment. Marxist analysis makes sense of this perversion of the state. Capitalism promotes the accumulation of wealth in the owning class. This ultra-rich minority then deploys their wealth in defense of their social dominion. We see this in action every time corporations and their executives spend millions of dollars financing politicians, who supposedly regulate them and are responsible to the public. Through control of the media, wealthy interests propagandize the capitalist status-quo.47 The role of a public government in an advanced capitalist economy is eventually reduced to one of entrenching private wealth and existing class hierarchies. Late political scientist Sheldon Wollin refers to the rule over the public state by private corporations as ‘inverted-totalitarianism’.48

A final question remains. Why do corporations want schools open? I think there are two reasons. First, school closures cascade into business closures and demand federal relief programs, as workers are forced to shift from laboring for the capitalist class to laboring for their children and families at home. Even two more weeks of remote school clearly sets too much of an anti-capitalist precedent and poses too big of a problem for the capitalist status-quo. Second, school is one of the most important institutions to capital. At least in part, the function of most U.S. public schools is to weed-out critical dissenters and to graduate perfect workers under capitalism, who are literate and capable of algebra, ignorant of peoples’ histories, uncritical, obedient, and most of all fully socialized into the circumstance of working for 7 hours, 5 days a week, on tasks that they have no say in determining and often find meaningless, with extrinsic threats and rewards as motivation, within a hierarchical organization. The Correspondence Principle, as proposed by economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, finds that high grades in school correlate less with measured intellectual abilities than with personality traits such as perseverance, consistency, and punctuality, while low grades correlate more with creativity, aggressiveness, and independence than high grades or measures of intelligence. Further, the exact same correspondence holds in the workplace. The first set of traits correlate with a high likelihood of being promoted, while the second set correlate with a low likelihood of promotion.49 ‘Good student’ is a euphemism for ‘good worker’.

Schools must be open for corporations, not for students, and federal officials have done their part to make sure schools are open because they submit to private power, a precondition of appointment or election. Schools must be open so workers can continue to labor for rich executives, and because it cannot be revealed to the masses that an alternative situation involving less work and publicly compensated costs of living is possible.

Back to school tomorrow.

Sources
1.↩ https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
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16.↩ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... n-schools/
17.↩ https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/02 ... cerns.html
18.↩ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ation.html
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https://mronline.org/2022/01/11/why-mus ... stay-open/

"Think of the children!"...

[blindpig]

China expands international medical solidarity to fight COVID
January 17, 2022 Scott Scheffer


A delivery of Chinese COVID vaccines arrives in Cambodia.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has overseen a failed effort to combat COVID-19, and in fact, appears to have thrown up its hands in surrender. As of this writing, 843,000 people in the U.S. have died, and the omicron variant is now overloading hospitals with COVID patients, including thousands of children.

The symptoms may or may not be less severe – assessments in the media are contradictory. But in Chicago, Boston and New York City, where the earliest surges of omicron took place, patients are dying on only a slightly smaller scale than during previous waves of infections – because of the sheer number of cases.

In spite of all this, capitalist government institutions are pulling back control efforts. Millions of parents are worrying that the premature return to in-school studying will send their children to the hospital.

Two weeks ago, just days after a Dec. 21 letter from the CEO of Delta Airlines requesting that the isolation period be lessened, the CDC did exactly that. The isolation guidelines were lowered from 10 days to five days.

Had there been a higher level of global cooperation early in the pandemic, it’s questionable whether omicron would have even come into existence.

U.S. capitalists block cooperation

The means to vaccinate the world through a cooperative international plan existed, and as the U.S. spewed hateful propaganda and anti-communist conspiracy theories, the Chinese government repeatedly called for a cooperative effort. But the chance to move forward was squandered by capitalist greed and vaccine nationalism promoted by U.S. big money.

Giant corporations that own health insurance companies, hospital chains and drug manufacturers, as well as the banks that invest in them, are so dominant in the U.S. economy that the availability of health care has historically compared miserably even to other major capitalist countries.

That U.S. capitalism produced one of the most resourceful scientific and medical communities in history didn’t help, because it also has commodified all of science to an extent never seen before. Life-saving medical care and even preventive medicine is a privilege that communities of color and poor people in general are often denied.

Further, instead of going all-out to produce and distribute vaccines globally, the U.S. ruling class’ nationalist and genocidal hoarding of life-saving science is what gave SARS-CoV-2 all the time it needed to mutate and for the omicron variant to emerge in Africa, where the vaccination rate is in the single digits.

Even the design of the mRNA vaccines – whose development and production was funded by the U.S. government – points to the nationalist orientation of giant capitalists. Regardless of how effective they are, the required cold storage and transportation makes them impractical for a global vaccination campaign.

That didn’t have to be the case. For instance, once the science, research, development and manufacture of the vaccines was accomplished, redirecting the resources normally devoted to the U.S. imperialist war machine might have made short work of COVID-19.

Many other countries with far fewer advantages than the United States have done a much better job protecting lives and controlling the spread of the disease.

Socialist countries’ achievements

Cuba and China have stood out as models of how a pandemic should be dealt with.

Every revolution of the 20th century that set out to build socialism, at its onset, exhibited an all-out effort to improve health care. This history of prioritizing health instead of profit is the foundation of the remarkable achievements by both countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

China and Cuba used every resource possible to produce vaccines and treatments to protect their own populations. At the same time – because a pandemic cannot be ended by vaccinating within the borders of one country – they both have shared medical teams, vaccines, treatments and supplies internationally, even while combating the disease at home.

When the 1949 Chinese Revolution ended what they called the “century of humiliation,” the early days in the process of rebuilding saw an unprecedented determination to eradicate diseases that were associated with deep poverty.

Beginning in 1949 and growing during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s army of “barefoot doctors” received basic medical training and set out for the countryside to promote preventive care and treat common illnesses.

Over the decades, China has beaten back or eliminated numerous communicable diseases that had run rampant throughout the country, such as plague, smallpox, cholera and typhus. In addition, cases of malaria and schistosomiasis have been reduced dramatically.

Schistosomiasis – a parasitic disease from freshwater snails – infected 10 million Chinese people in the mid-1950s. Mao was so elated as the eradication campaign began showing signs of success that he wrote poetry about it and spoke about it frequently.

China’s Health Silk Road

While it is true that the Communist Party of China has prevailed on many capitalist corporations operating there to contribute to health care and the general welfare of the population, the Chinese health care system itself is almost wholly state-owned, and the “Health Silk Road,” as China’s international medical solidarity has come to be called, is a longtime CPC initiative.

Notably, and to great praise by international health agencies, China has been working hard to replicate this success against diseases of poverty as part of the Health Silk Road, particularly against schistosomiasis in Africa, where 90% of cases exist today.

This drive to help spread health care internationally has ramped up during the pandemic. When COVID began killing people in droves during March 2020, Chinese medical teams went to hard-hit Iran and Italy. By June 2021, the foreign ministry announced that China had delivered more than 350 million vaccine doses to more than 80 countries.

Last August, President Xi Jinping pledged a $100-million donation to Covax, an international agency coordinating global vaccine distribution, but added a pledge of 2 billion vaccine doses to be provided internationally outside of Covax.

By October 2021 the China International Development Cooperation Agency reported that over 1.5 billion doses have already been delivered to 106 countries, focusing on Africa, Asia, Latin America and the South Pacific.

While there is still much to be done to safeguard the Global South from this deadly disease and possible new variants, China continues its own medical internationalism and its call for global cooperation instead of Cold War slander and capitalist greed.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... ght-covid/

Beijing requires nucleic acid test within 72 hours of entry
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-01-16 17:42


A house management staffer sprays disinfectants onto delivery packages at a community which has been sealed off after an Omicron case was detected in Beijing's Haidian District on Jan 16, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

Beijing will require nucleic acid tests within 72 hours of entry into the city, in a move to step up COVID-19 prevention after the city reported its first local Omicron case on Saturday.

The policy will start on Jan 22 and last through the end of March, according to Beijing Daily, covering the Chinese New Year holiday season and the city's Winter Olympics.

Previously Beijing required travelers to provide a negative nucleic acid result from 48 hours ahead of entry and a valid health code.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 814d9.html

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Brazil: COVID-19 Cases Rise, Hospitals, Economy Under Pressure


As the COVID-19 cases increase the health care institutions and the economy are under pressure. Jan. 14, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@Gate_15_Analyst

Published 14 January 2022

Brazil staggers as COVID-19 cases continued to increase due to the fast speaking Omicron variant, putting hospitals and the economy under pressure.

Brazil faces a big rise in COVID-19 cases as the Omicron strain spreads across the country, pushing health services and the already sputtering economy to the edge.

There are clear signs of the increase of infections hitting the nation hard, driven by deficient testing and data blockade caused by hackers that have made it harder to track the spread of the highly contagious variant in Brazil.

The cases almost doubled in numbers since last week, with an average of 27,267 infected last Wednesday, rising to 52,500. According to experts, the real number is much higher, given the low testing and patchy systems for disclosure of the data. So far there is an average of 120 deaths per day, remaining much lower than last year.

According to Reuters calculations, Brazil has the third-highest death toll from COVID-19 with more than 620,000 registered death. There have been many critics of Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro, for the way he is handling the pandemic situation, the rallies against lockdowns, and his refusal to wear a mask in public and not get vaccinated.


Epidemiologists consider that a strong vaccination campaign would see 67 percent of the population fully inoculated, which would reduce the impact of the current pandemic waves.

As the situation continues to demand health services, hospitals are suffering staff reductions as doctors and nurses self-isolate after being confirmed positive for the virus. Eduardo Fernandes, head of the Brazilian Medical Association (AMB) says, "if you don't know a friend who's got the virus at the moment, it means you don't have any friends."

"The situation is worrying and some services may collapse," he added, saying that since the Omicron wave hit the staff shortage at hospitals tripled.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bra ... -0016.html

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Back To Normal Isn’t Enough
672Comments

KELSEY MCKINNEY
1:04 PM EST on Jan 14, 2022

Yesterday, I went to the local pharmacy in my neighborhood to pick up my monthly prescriptions. The pharmacy is small and narrow, and was crowded at 5 p.m. A few children were waiting in line to receive booster shots, their tired-eyed parents trying to corral them. The rest of us stood in another line waiting for the pharmacists, who raced back and forth trying desperately to keep the parents calm and the vaccine line moving and the prescriptions going into their bags and over the counter and out of the store. They were overwhelmed. The line kept growing.

One of the parents kept waving the clipboard with the form for his child every time the pharmacist had a minute to breathe. Around the fifth time he did this, two men waiting patiently near me in the line turned and snapped at him. “Shut the fuck up,” the guy in front of me said. “Can’t you see he’s trying his best?” There was no evident coordination between the two. They just each seemed to reach the end of their respective tethers at the same moment.

The pharmacist ignored this exchange, but the tension lingered. The annoying parent, to his credit, stopped waving the clipboard, stopped asking when it would be his child’s turn. Standing there for 20 minutes, waiting, I felt a dread that has appeared regularly and without warning for months. All of us were at, or near, our breaking points: the people in the line, the pharmacists, the children, the parents. Everyone is exhausted and frustrated.

All around the pharmacy these signs were hung, printed on regular paper with the words “NO RAPID TESTS” in giant blue font, highlighted yellow. They have been up for weeks. It all feels like some terribly boring nightmare, this gentle constant frustration in the space where hope used to be.

Two weeks ago, in the same pharmacy, I helped a woman who only spoke Spanish find the city webpage about rapid tests on her phone. We are lucky in Washington, D.C. Our city government has decided to do something, and done it. They have made rapid tests free to pick up at one library in each ward, two rapid test boxes per person per day with proof you live in the district. There are no flyers anywhere about this, though, and unlike the many times our mayor has instituted curfews, the city sent no push-alerts telling people about it. I knew because I read local news and follow my city representative on Instagram. When I told the woman in the pharmacy, she had no idea.

Standing in the line this week, I could not stop thinking about her, about the signs that only said NO, about the fact that the president of the country where all this has been and still is happening, tweeted last week that American people should try Google to find rapid tests instead of doing what many other wealthy countries have easily managed, which is mailing those tests to people’s houses for free. I have been thinking about how it feels and what it means to have been left so thoroughly alone.

Get a vaccine, the CDC says, because you can’t afford to get sick. Pay $30 for a rapid test, the drugstore says. Get to work, employers say, it’s important. Quitting your job, the papers add, will upset your boss, whose feelings matter. You shouldn’t have used that space heater to keep your family warm since the landlord refuses to fix the heat, a mayor tells the survivors and the dead of a building fire; you should have closed the door, which was built to close by itself but does not, as you fled your burning apartment. All of this, finally, is your problem. It’s your fault. It’s you.

It’s not, though. That’s what has been keeping me awake long after I’ve climbed into bed. It’s not us. We are not the ones who have failed. The country has always worked this way. You just tend to notice it more when all that absence comes barrelling down on you at once.

Early in the pandemic, I felt a dangerous kind of hope even when things were very bad. Lots of people were dying; everyone on the street seemed terrified. There was very little toilet paper to be found in my neighborhood. Everything was dire. In April 2020, 14 percent of Americans were unemployed. But it also seemed like the government might actually do something to help, and they did. They passed a bill to fund vaccine research and development worth $8.3 billion. They passed the CARES act, which actually sent people some money to help them survive. Student loan payments were suspended, as were evictions. Maybe, I let myself dream, this could open up some kind of possibility down the line—that watching our society crack might inspire us to patch those weak points up, maybe even through some sort of New Deal. Maybe this massive universal trauma could be redeemed, and future ones prevented, by creating a society that worked better for everyone.

And we got the CARES Act, and we got the miraculous vaccine. Scientists were stunned that, less than a year after the global outbreak of the virus, vaccines were being put into people’s arms. It had never been done before! But that initial burst of optimism has long since left behind a country bitter, and scared, and broken. Today, 10 months after my first dose and two months after my booster, I realize that my hope and my optimism was unfounded. The points of weakness are now points of leverage—you can still lose everything just from getting sick, the state says, so get vaccinated. And good luck. We have been rewarded for all of our suffering and all of our patience and all of our frustration with not just the same broken country we’ve always had, but a concerted effort to make sure that Returning To Normal does not mean improving upon the pre-COVID status quo in any meaningful way.


The United States does not become the kind of country that threatens its citizens with onerous hospital bills as part of a vaccine promotion campaign by accident. This is how the country was built, and how the system has grown to work; it is how it was designed. Even miraculous innovation on the order of MRNA vaccines is not used to make everyone’s lives better. It was only marketed that way, for a little while.

This might explain, as I’ve tried to figure out this blog, why I have not been able to stop thinking about the cotton gin. Most Americans were taught in school that the cotton gin was an American invention, the creation of a man named Eli Whitney. But until a couple of years ago, I didn’t realize why the cotton gin is really important.

I learned through reading The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist that before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, the profits of crops like indigo, tobacco, and rice—all of which were farmed by enslaved people—were dropping dramatically, leaving the U.S. economy in trouble. Cotton, a potential cash crop, was thwarted by a very narrow bottleneck in its production. Seeds had to be removed from the cotton by hand, which dramatically limited the amount of cotton that could be picked every day. That work is what the cotton gin did. It allowed enslavers to clean as much cotton for market as they could grow and harvest, and broke that bottleneck. This, we have been taught, was a world-historic innovation. But there was more to it than that, Baptist explains:

“Once the gin shattered the processing bottleneck, other limits on production and expansion were cast into new relief. For instance, one constraint was the amount of cheap, fertile land. Another was the lack of labor on the frontier. So enslaver-generals took land from Indians, enslaver-politicians convinced Congress to let slavery expand, and enslaver-entrepreneurs created new ways to finance and transport and codify ‘hands.’ And given a finite number of captives in their own control, entrepreneurs created a complex of labor control practices that enslaved people called ‘the pushing system.’ […] Innovation in violence, in fact, was the foundation of the widely shared pushing system.”

The cotton industry, bolstered by this invention, was later used by economists as an example of “perfect competition.” The market was so large that no one could control more than one percent of the total. Innovations were shared among these competitors, including innovations in violence. The cotton industry of the 19th century was the archetype upon which Alfred Marshall grounded the famous supply-and-demand curves we were all taught in school. An industry based entirely on the inhumane and atrocious business of slavery meant enough to the people profiting from it that they seceded from the union and started a civil war.

Ever since I learned this, I haven’t been able to hear the word “innovation” without cringing. Who is the innovation for? Whose lives will it ruin, and what exactly will it make better in the world? This, I am coming to realize, is the fundamental flaw with capitalism as we live it. If it does breed innovation, that innovation has no inherent ethics; left alone, it could ruin more people’s lives than it helps.

A system that funnels rapid antigen tests through various companies trying to make money off them, for instance, isn’t one that cares about us at all, although it is the one in which we must participate in pursuit of that care. Sure, we have the miracle of the vaccine, but as I am being promised that we will be “returning to normal” soon and that the country is “reopening,” I don’t feel optimistic. The normal we had before was bad for most people. After two years of misery, going back to it just does not feel like enough. The vaccines are miraculous, but they cannot and will not fix what actually ails us.

The minimum wage is still atrociously low. Cops are still shooting black people in the streets. School shootings are only down because the students are learning virtually. Everything is more expensive and not any nicer. Our experiences of buying things are also bad. The government’s relationship with the people is that of a disapproving and forgetful grandparent with a very young and very naughty child. The country is in shambles, and everyone can feel it.

Here is the trauma of this generation, the moment in which the present became so oppressive and deadly and bad that there was no choice but to envision a better future. How silly of me to assume that what had held true for the generations now in power would extend to us. How ridiculous to dream that we might get our own Works Progress Administration, or a livable minimum wage, or some student loan debt relief. How impossibly naive to believe that something might get better as a response to how much worse everything had become.

The people in charge, it seems clear, never wanted things to get better. Since the earliest days of the pandemic they have given us vague instructions, asked us to sacrifice our lives and our happiness for the faint promise of Getting Back To Normal. If we suffered gamely enough, for long enough, we might win back… the same country we had before.

It’s the same threat the Democratic party makes every election cycle now. ​​”We’ve got to vote like the future of our democracy depends on it,” a letter from Michelle Obama published this week read. The Republican party is making a very real effort to restrict voting rights and make future frauds easier to perpetuate, but the opposition’s promise isn’t a better future or a better life. The Democrats are now the party of only trying to stop things from getting worse; they currently control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency and yet they have accomplished very little, either because they are so corrupt or so self-defeating or so uninterested as to have accepted the idea that Accomplishing Very Little is what they are there to do. Because there is no link between “saving democracy” and the policies this so-called democracy might pass to make our lives better, it once again feels like we are being threatened. That’s a nice brutal and untenable status quo you’ve got there, it leers, be a shame if you did something that let it get somehow even worse. We have now endured almost two full years of all this hardship, and stand to get nothing but its (contingent) end in return.

Time does not run backwards. The virus exists now and will continue to exist. But in order to continue underserving the people they represent, elected officials need us to believe that the past was an idyllic time to which we should want to return. They need us to look at the cotton gin and praise American innovation, instead of seeing an instrument of violence. They need us to idealize the past because the system blithely fails most people in the present. They need us to feel like it is our fault that the things schoolchildren are told make the United States different, and great, quite obviously no longer work at all.

Standing in the pharmacy this week, I remembered how early in the pandemic there was a small hope that maybe, because everyone was sick, insurance companies would somehow go bankrupt. Maybe, we would finally get some kind of healthcare to rival every other democracy in the world. I remembered this because for months I have been fighting with my insurance. I need to take 450 mg of a drug. My initial prescription was for three 150 mg pills, but the insurance I pay so much fucking money for argues with the pharmacist every single month because they want me to take one 300 mg pill and one 150 mg pill. The prescription has been fixed to this inane, ridiculous requirement for months now, but still the insurance flags it and creates some kind of problem that the overworked but very kind pharmacist then has to solve for me. Every single person in the line in front of me had an issue like this.

The pharmacy wasn’t chaotic because the people behind the counter weren’t doing their jobs. The pharmacy is chaotic because the system in which it exists pushes it towards that chaos. The chaos was caused by a poor vaccine rollout program that forced extra work onto pharmacists without extra staffing or resources. It was caused by a terrible healthcare system that makes it difficult for them just to fill prescriptions in the first place. It was caused by poor, lazy information distribution, which made it unclear when children could be boosted and how. It was not caused by people who, after being ground down for two years, just didn’t have the bandwidth to think about other people. You have to put your own oxygen mask on first so that you can help the people around you.

That, then, was what hung in the air in the pharmacy after some tired men told another tired man to calm down—the sense that all of us just had to try to get what we could. I see people all around me helping each other even more than before. Everyone is frustrated, and their patience is thin, but no one is defeated yet. In the pharmacy, people yelled at the clipboard man, sure, but it was to help the pharmacist. They held open the doors for a parent with a stroller. They pointed when someone dropped a glove. The desire to support each other is unflagging even when people are exhausted.

We pay taxes, theoretically, so that the oxygen masks will (at a bare minimum) drop from the ceiling before the plane crashes. But the masks are not dropping and we are rapidly losing altitude. The option of paying $40 for a mask that should be handed to us is dangled in our faces while a $2.1 billion fighter jet lands safely beneath us. The government, whose only purpose is to help us work better than we work alone, is fundamentally failing us. Of course it is infuriating.

The problem is no longer just the pandemic. It is, more precisely, that our government is blaming the pandemic for problems that it created. We do not deserve to go back to a normal that is so terribly bad for most people. We do not deserve to pay more for worse things. We do not deserve to be sold the lie that it is just more important for companies to make money than it is for us to live. Certainly no one would choose that, if they felt they had a choice.

We deserve a country that uses our tax dollars to make our lives richer, and better, and easier. We deserve a country that can promise a future that improves upon some glorified, false version of our past. We deserve, simply, a country that makes it easier to be alive. That is what a society is supposed to be—people working together to help each other and make the places they live better. It is what we wait for, what keeps the lines orderly. It is supposed to get better.

https://defector.com/back-to-normal-isnt-enough/

Something I've been seeing of late in some anarchist(libertarian?) friendly sites is a call to arms over the authoritarian measures being decreed by governments in response to the pandemic. It is argued that these measures are a Trojan Horse intended to further and increasingly restrict individual freedom. Of course there is a danger of this, of course they will take advantage of this opportunistically. (It is very unfortunate that chlamor and I fell out over this).

Two years in it has become screamingly obvious that the important distinction is whose authority. The capitalist nations, with the partial exceptions of some outliers, have instituted restrictive measures too late and ended them too soon when adopted at all. And it ain't just meanness or fascists leanings that causes them to do this, it is necessity, capitalist necessity, which is grossly misrepresented as 'normal'. Socialist and socialist leaning nations have other necessities, human necessities, their authority is legitimate.

There is 'authority' and then there is 'authority' and to rage against the authority of the people is a kind of vulgar nihilism and infantile.

[blindpig]

Covid 19 And The Failure Of Individualism

According to Brazilian scientist Lucia Souto, vaccine inequalities and science denialism – two results of neoliberal individualism – are derailing humanity.

by Rede Brasil Atual

In an interview on Radio Brasil Atual, Dr. Lucia Souto, President of the Brazilian Center for Health Studies (CEBES) and research scientist at Fiocruz Institute, said the only way for the World to overcome the current health crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic is through a sense of the collective. Faced with the inequality of vaccination between rich and poor countries and the denialism of part of the population, she said, humanity is witnessing the failure of the neoliberal project that promotes individualism.

Dr. Souto recalled how former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used to say that individualism – the fuel of neoliberalism – would lead the World. In contrast, she cited a recent editorial by former Uruguayan president José Mujica, for Deutsche Welle , calling 2021 the “year of failure” because rich countries seemed to fail to comprehend that the pandemic is global, and therefore it is necessary to vaccinate everyone equally, including those in the world’s poorest countries.

“The neoliberal project, which only considers money, has failed,” said Souto. “40 years ago Margaret Thatcher said that we had reached the end of the age of societies and the entered age of the individual. In the context of a pandemic like the one we are currently facing, this is absolutely absurd. As Mujica says, either we will develop a collective exit strategy or humanity will fail.”

Vaccination and the individualist concept of freedom

Several Brazilian cities have begun requiring proof of immunization, which conservatives refer to as “vaccine passports”, to enter events and establishments . President Jair Bolsonaro and his cronies criticize the measures, saying they limit the “freedom” of those who choose not to be vaccinated. According to Souto, the only solution to the pandemic is collective and there is no room for the “false freedom” of science denialists.

“True freedom is based on the interests of the community, the collective,” she said. “In the middle of worst pandemic we have faced in a century, why not implement proof of vaccine requirements? It’s the least society can do.”

Last Friday Fiocruz Institute President Nísia Trindade, said that they have the productive capacity to manufacture and donate doses of covid-19 vaccine to countries that still have low rates of immunization. Souto praised this as an important measure to guarantee vaccination equity in the world. “In Brazil, we have a high vaccination rate, but there is no solution by looking at countries individually. The solution to this crisis will come through vaccine equity. That’s why Fiocruz’s measure is extremely important. Vaccination inequality is the result of an economic model that does not consider health as a common good,” she said.

This article was translated from Portuguese by Brian Mier and can be seen in its original format, at Rede Brasil Atual, here. https://www.redebrasilatual.com.br/saud ... eoliberal/

https://www.brasilwire.com/covid-19-and ... vidualism/

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Brazil adds more than 130,000 cases of coronavirus in 24 hours


The average number of coronavirus cases in Brazil in the last week stood at 83,205 daily, the highest since the start of the pandemic. | Photo: EFE

Published January 19, 2022 (9 hours 19 minutes ago)

Brazil has not seen such a high number of daily infections since last September 18, when it reported 150,110 infections.

Brazil, one of the countries hardest hit by Covid-19 in the world, registered 137,103 new coronavirus infections in the last 24 hours, the second highest number of cases for one day since the start of the pandemic.

The South American country has not seen such a high number of daily infections since last September 18, when it reported 150,110 infections.

Without considering the numbers of September 18, the number of infections on Tuesday is the highest since the start of the pandemic and exceeds the 115,230 infections of last June 23, at the peak of the second wave of the pandemic.

The number of daily infections in Brazil multiplied by 80 in the last two weeks, from 1,720 cases on January 2 to 137,103 on the last day, driven by the presence of the omicron variant in the country.

With the increase in infections, the average number of cases in the last week stood at 83,205 daily, the highest since the start of the pandemic.

According to data from the Ministry of Health, in addition to the 137,103 new cases, 351 new deaths from covid were recorded in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths to 621,513 and the number of infections to 23,211,894 since the start of the pandemic. .

Health authorities indicated that the number of deaths has also been growing in recent days, driven by Ómicron.

The number of deaths on January 18 was the highest in the last two months, since that registered on November 17 (373 deaths).

These pandemic figures confirm Brazil as the second country in the number of deaths from Covid-19 in the world after the United States and as the third in number of infections after the US and India.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/brasil-s ... -0001.html

Google Translator

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US: Nearly 9.5 Mln Child COVID-19 Cases, Spiking “Dramatically”


A woman and her children cross a road in Evanston, north of Chicago, Illinois, the United States, on Jan. 26, 2021. | Photo: Joel Lerner/Xinhua

Published 18 January 2022 (12 hours 21 minutes ago)

A total of 9,452,491 child COVID-19 cases had been reported across the country as of Jan. 13, and children represented 17.8 percent of all confirmed cases, according to a report.


Nearly 9.5 million children in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic, and child COVID-19 cases have "spiked dramatically" across the country, according to the latest report of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children's Hospital Association.

A total of 9,452,491 child COVID-19 cases had been reported across the country as of Jan. 13, and children represented 17.8 percent of all confirmed cases, according to the report published Tuesday.

The overall rate was 12,559 cases per 100,000 children in the population.

Nearly 1 million child cases were reported in the past week ending Jan. 13, four times the rate of the peak of last winters' surge, according to the AAP.

The weekly case count is a 69 percent increase over the 580,000 added cases reported the previous week, and a tripling of case counts from the two weeks prior, according to the AAP.

This marks the 23rd week in a row child COVID-19 cases in the United States are above 100,000. Since the first week of September, there have been over 4.4 million additional child cases, according to the AAP.

Children accounted for 1.7 percent to 4.4 percent of total reported hospitalizations, and 0 to 0.26 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, according to the report.

"There is an urgent need to collect more age-specific data to assess the severity of illness related to new variants as well as potential longer-term effects," said the AAP in the report.

"It is important to recognize there are immediate effects of the pandemic on children's health, but importantly we need to identify and address the long-lasting impacts on the physical, mental, and social well-being of this generation of children and youth," said the report.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0022.html

[blindpig]

NYT equates China’s health workers with Adolf Eichmann

A twisted narrative by a paper unhinged by China’s success with Covid-19

By JOHN WALSH
JANUARY 19, 2022


A medical worker tests a resident for Covid-19 in Xian, China, in December 2021. Photo: Reddit via AFP / Stringer

In a article on the front page of The New York Times on January 13, reporter Li Yuan equated the public health and medical personnel behind China’s successful battle against Covid-19 in the city of Xian to Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the Holocaust. The article’s opening sentence views these personnel as typical of “the millions of people who work diligently toward” containing Covid-19 in China.

The anti-Covid campaign in Xian, a city of 13 million, has terminated the spread of Covid-19 without a single death and limited its spread to about 2,000 cases. The Nazi Holocaust designed and managed by Eichmann resulted in the extermination of millions of Jews.

The piece takes aim at the millions of Chinese who have worked tirelessly to do the rapid mass testing, tracing, quarantining and vaccinations and to staffing the lockdowns including ensuring that those under lockdown were supplied with necessities of life.


As a result of their work China has reported about 100,000 cases Covid-19 and fewer than 5,000 deaths. The mortality count has been verified by a count of excess deaths in a peer-reviewed article by a team from Oxford University and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the prestigious British Medical Journal; it is summarized here for the layman.

Peter Hessler, who was living and teaching in Chengdu, Sichuan, during the first of the lockdowns, described these workers as follows in a New Yorker piece in March 2020:

“When I asked if there had been much resistance to the new policies, he [the Communist Party official in charge of the lockdown in Hessler’s neighborhood in Chengdu] shook his head. ‘Ninety percent of the population agrees,’ he said. ‘We have some people who think it’s not convenient, and they want to go out and play mah-jongg or something. But most people follow the rules.’

“From what I had seen, he wasn’t exaggerating. The overwhelming compliance was one of the most impressive features of the lockdown, along with the dedication of grassroots officials. In Wuhan, the government had sent 1,800 teams of epidemiologists, each consisting of at least five people, to trace the contacts of infected citizens. The WHO report noted that the containment effort had been possible because of ‘the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action.’” (Emphasis added.)

Contrast that with this from Wikipedia’s entry on Eichmann:

“Eichmann and his staff became responsible for Jewish deportations to extermination camps, where the victims were gassed. Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, and Eichmann oversaw the deportation of much of the Jewish population. Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where about 75% were murdered upon arrival.

“By the time the transports were stopped in July 1944, 437,000 of Hungary’s 725,000 Jews had been killed. Dieter Wisliceny testified at Nuremberg that Eichmann told him he would ‘leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had 5 million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.'”

How can the NYT’s Li Yuan equate the two? The polemic used to justify the equation deserves examination, because it demonstrates how the paper’s construction of the narrative of the day often works.

The tone and target are set by the online headline, which reads ominously, “The Army of Millions Who Enforce China’s Zero-Covid Policy, at All Costs.” (Emphasis added.) Later the case for the Eichmann equation begins as follows:


“The government has the help of a vast army of community workers who carry out the policy [of dynamic zero Covid] with zeal…. The tragedies in Xian have prompted some Chinese people to question how those enforcing the quarantine rules can behave like this.”

What are these tragedies? The author comes up with three presented near the very beginning of the piece.

First was a man with chest pains whose hospital admission was delayed by six hours and later died of a heart attack; the bureaucratic delay related to his living in a medium-risk district.

Second, a pregnant woman whose admission was also delayed because her Covid test appeared invalid; after admission she miscarried.

Third, a young man who was violating a curfew and got into an altercation with security guards.

Certainly, each of the first two these events is a tragic and unacceptable error. The third is hard to judge – if it is true. But in a city of many millions threatened with a deadly outbreak of the Delta variant of Covid, there were bound to be some mistakes. And if these are the worst of them, then it would seem that praise should be heaped on Xian’s hospital and public health workers.


Nevertheless, the first two of these incidents caused an outcry far and wide over the Internet, leading officials to take action. (Note that the disclosure and widespread discussion online belie the idea that there is no opening for criticism in China.)

The mass complaints led to the temporary closure of the hospitals to examine their procedures and ultimately to the punishing of those in charge. A national declaration made it clear that no patient was to be turned away from a hospital under any circumstances.

Building on these three anecdotes and neglecting any context up to this point, reporter Li continues:

“‘The banality of evil’ is a concept Chinese intellectuals often invoke in moments like Xian. It was coined by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote that Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, was an ordinary man who was motivated by ‘an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.’

“Chinese intellectuals are struck by how many officials and civilians – often driven by professional ambition or obedience – are willing to be the enablers of authoritarian policies.”

Who are these unnamed “intellectuals”? That is not clear. Certainly, there are a good many Chinese intellectuals in the country and abroad who are proud of China’s handling of the pandemic.

In summary, the anatomy of the article is a headline, then a cherry-picked set of anecdotes to set the tone. It is important that this mood be set as arrestingly and strikingly as possible. The most outrageous exceptions to the rule must be presented as though they are the norm. Finally based on these anecdotes, far-fetched conclusions are drawn based on the assumption that the anecdotes are representative.


Later on, buried deep in the article some context may be slipped in as a way to cover the writer’s derriere. Noam Chomsky many years ago suggested reading the NYT’s articles beginning with the end, since that is where the real information may lie. Often, any such qualifications are left out, resulting in a giant lie of omission.

That is how it is done.

There is a bright spot, however. Many if not most of the comments posted online, at least at the time of my reading, found Li’s polemic to be baseless, even downright absurd. Americans are not so easily deceived as the NYT editors may think. This is heartening, because the daily demonization of China in the US mass media, relentlessly and prominently so in the NYT, is a prelude to conflict and war.

As author Caitlin Johnstone tells us, “Before they drop the bombs, they drop the narrative.” The NYT is carpet-bombing us Americans with an anti-China narrative these days.

One must ask in the end, what is the animus that drives this anti-China diatribe? Is it fear of the loss of the US role as global hegemon? Is it the self-righteousness and arrogance of the Exceptionalists? Or is it simply careerism in the service of an evil agenda, the very thing Hannah Arendt deplored?

https://asiatimes.com/2022/01/nyt-equat ... -eichmann/

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A worker finalizes details to start the production at the recently inaugurated CIGB Industrial Biotechnological Complex in Mariel, Cuba, on November 5, 2021. (Photo: Yander Zamora/AFP via Getty Images)

Bank Blocks Donations Supporting Cuban Effort to Vaccinate World

"A European bank, established in the Netherlands, has decided to put the interests of the U.S. government above the lives of millions of people."

KENNY STANCIL

January 19, 2022
Progressive International recently asked for contributions so they can send a delegation to Havana next week to promote Cuba's effort to vaccinate the world against Covid-19.

But in an apparent genuflection to the illegal U.S. embargo against the island, Dutch multinational bank ING has blocked all donations supporting the trip, the group said Tuesday.

"This is scandalous," said Progressive International (PI) general coordinator David Adler.

"The U.S. wields unparalleled power over our global financial system," Adler continued. "Yesterday, a message received by our supporter revealed the far-reaching consequences of the U.S. embargo on Cuba: a European bank, established in the Netherlands, has decided to put the interests of the U.S. government above the lives of millions of people."

He added that "the embargo seeks not only to suffocate Cuba, but also to stifle our solidarity with it."


In his message on Wednesday, Adler lamented that "it looks like others are following suit."

According to Pawel Wargan, coordinator of PI's Secretariat, PayPal has joined ING in blocking donations meant to help delegates travel to Havana. "We have a duty to end this genocidal embargo," said Wargan.


Anti-war activists at CodePink responded to the news by saying that "some of the most powerful people in the world would rather prolong a global pandemic than allow the Cuban people some relief from U.S. imperialism. What awful, deadly priorities."

As the coronavirus crisis enters its third year, new infections have reached record levels globally. Meanwhile, access to lifesaving vaccines remains starkly unequal. Several countries are administering booster shots—hundreds of millions of which are set to be thrown away in the coming weeks—before most of the world's poorest inhabitants have been given their first jab.

Nearly 9.8 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered globally to date. More than 70% of people in high-income nations have been fully inoculated, but just 9.6% of people in low-income countries have received at least one shot due to dose hoarding by wealthy governments and knowledge hoarding by pharmaceutical corporations, whose profit-driven refusal to share publicly funded vaccine formulas has generated artificial scarcity.

According to a recent analysis, billions of additional Covid-19 vaccine doses are required to end the pandemic—meaning that global vaccine manufacturing must be ramped up significantly.

As PI said Monday when sharing its plan to send representatives to Havana "for a special showcase of the Cuban vaccines":

President Joe Biden could easily help fill this shortfall by compelling U.S. pharmaceutical corporations to share their vaccine technology with poorer nations. But he has so far refused to do so. A new production hub in Africa—where only 3% of people are vaccinated—is now trying to replicate the Moderna vaccine. But without Moderna's help, or Joe Biden's executive action, production could take more than a year to begin.

By contrast, PI continued, "Cuba has emerged as a powerful engine of vaccine internationalism."

That's precisely why PI is sending a delegation to Havana: to draw attention to "the promise of the Cuban vaccine and the perils of the U.S. embargo against it," with the goal of forging "connections between Cuba's public biotech sector and manufacturers who might produce the vaccine and help the Cuban government recuperate the costs of its development."

Despite the added challenges created by a six decade-long U.S. blockade, Cuba's public biotech sector has developed two highly effective vaccines. And its universal healthcare system has fully inoculated more than 86% of its population, quickly surpassing many wealthier nations, including its northern neighbor.

Moreover, the island has already started exporting its homegrown doses and plans to share its recipes with impoverished nations abandoned by Big Pharma and wealthy countries.

"We are not a multinational where returns are the number one reason for existing," said Vicente Vérez Bencomo of the Finlay Vaccines Institute in Cuba. "For us, it's about achieving health."

A nurse vaccinates an elderly woman against Covid-19 with Cuban vaccine Abdala in Havana on August 2, 2021
Cuba's Homegrown Covid-19 Vaccines Poised to Protect Millions in Poor Nations
Kenny Stancil

Unlike the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna, Cuba opted to develop protein-based vaccines, a move that experts say comes with multiple advantages.

First, Cuba's vaccines, Abdala and Soberana 02, can be stored at room temperature, making distribution easier, especially in developing countries and remote areas lacking electricity. And second, they have a proven track record of safety across age groups, whereas mRNA technology has not yet been used on children under five.

Arguably the most important aspect of Cuba's vaccines, proponents say, is that their development demonstrates the existence of an alternative model for scientific research that puts people over profits.

However, PI noted, "the U.S. and its allies continue to oppress and exclude Cuba from the global health system."

"The U.S. blockade forced a shortage of syringes on the island that endangered its vaccine development and hindered mass production," PI explained. As Jacobin's Branko Marcetic reported two months ago, "international solidarity efforts have been vital... groups from the United States alone sent 6 million syringes to Cuba, with the Mexican government sending 800,000 more, and more than 100,000 on top of that coming from Cubans in China."

PI added that "U.S. medical journals 'marginalize scientific results that come from poor countries,' according to Vérez Bencomo. Meanwhile, the WHO refuses to accredit the Cuban vaccines, despite approval from regulators in countries like Argentina and Mexico."

"The Progressive International is sending a delegation to Havana to combat misinformation, to defend Cuban sovereignty, and to help vaccinate the world," the group announced Monday, adding:

Bringing delegates from the Union for Vaccine Internationalism, founded in June 2021 to fight the emerging apartheid, the Progressive International will convene Cuban scientists and government representatives to address international press and members of the scientific community in a showcase of the Cuban vaccine on January 25.

In response to ING's decision to block donations supporting the delegation's efforts, Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, coordinator of PI's Blueprint project, denounced Washington. The U.S. failed to deliver on its promise to "share its vaccines with the Global South," said Gandikota-Nellutla. "Neither will it let us make our own."


Adler, meanwhile, asked people to "help us fight back."

"We are undeterred in our mission to help vaccinate the world," he said. "On January 25, we will convene Cuban scientists and government representatives in Havana to address the international press and members of the scientific community in a showcase of the Cuban vaccine."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/ ... nate-world

[blindpig]

This Socialist Island Has Saved the Lives of 97% of Covid-19 Patients
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 23, 2022
Kawsachun News


Minister of Public Health José Angel Portal Miranda and Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz visit the Celia Sánchez Manduley Provincial Hospital in Granma where they held a meeting with health workers. January 13, 2022. Photo: MINSAP

97.4% of Cubans confirmed with Covid-19 have been saved over the last two years despite the extreme difficulties placed on the island’s public health system by the U.S. economic blockade on Cuba.

With more than one million people diagnosed with Covid-19 since the first positive patients were confirmed in Cuba in March 2020, 97.4% of people who have become ill have been saved on the island.

This “is not just another number in the statistics stack; It is, above all, an indisputable example of how much effort Cuba has made to protect the lives of our people in this period of hard battle against the epidemic within the country”, commented the Minister of Public Health, José Angel Portal Miranda, on the website of the Ministry of Public Health.

Difficult months of fighting the virus have brought plenty of lessons, which demonstrate the urgent need to comply in all scenarios with the action protocols designed for the preventive and therapeutic management of the disease, added the Minister.

87.5% of the entire Cuban population has been fully vaccinated with vaccines developed by the country’s own biotech industry: Soberana 02, Soberana Plus and Abdala. These vaccines are also reaching populations in countries whose health authorities have approved the use of Cuba’s vaccines.

With information from Granma

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/01/ ... -patients/

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Nearly expired vaccines harm COVID fight across Africa
By Adhere Cavince | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-01-24 09:11


A health worker shows a woman a vial containing a COVID-19 vaccine before administering it to her, at the Penda health center in Nairobi on Dec 9, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]

There is growing apprehension in many African countries regarding COVID-19 vaccines donated by rich countries. Millions of doses shipped to the continent have had a short shelf life, leading to expiration before they could be administered－a fact that is now compounding Africa's inoculation bid amid the global health crisis.

Nigeria reportedly destroyed 1 million doses of expired COVID-19 vaccines in December. The problem appears to spring from rushed political decisions by rich countries to donate previously hoarded vaccines to developing countries.

Instead of receiving vaccines that might expire soon, poor countries are now turning them down. The United Nations Children's Fund has said that developing countries turned down more than 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines that were about to expire by the end of last year. In addition, around 15 million doses of vaccines donated by the European Union were turned down by poor countries in October and November.

For a region like Africa that has since vaccinated just 8 percent of the eligible population, turning down vaccines is a painful experience. Burundi, for example, has only managed to vaccinate a paltry 0.07 percent of its population－the lowest inoculation record in Africa. Collectively, 85 percent of Africa's population or about a billion people are yet to receive a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine, according to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Donating nearly expired vaccines to Africa has presented three main challenges. First is the false hope that beneficiary countries would increase their vaccination numbers. Many African countries have no capacity to quickly distribute and administer vaccines with short life spans. Second, affected African countries are now forced to invest in vaccine waste treatment instead of putting their meager resources into additional vaccine purchases. Third, expired vaccines are driving a new form of vaccine apathy on the continent, with many people fearing that they could get expired vaccines.

This unfortunate scenario has forced the African Union to issue a strong advisory to countries that intend to donate COVID vaccines to the continent. Donors are now encouraged to declare in advance their intention to donate, including requisite numbers to be donated. In addition, donations should have a shelf life of not less than three months. These measures are aimed at giving African countries enough headroom to distribute and administer the vaccines.

Sending soon-to-expire vaccines to Africa runs counter to the rhetoric by donor countries of showing solidarity with developing countries in the pandemic fight. When it became clear that a vaccine against the pandemic was in the pipeline, there was palpable hope across the world, and more so in developing countries.

With weak health systems and doused economic vitality as a result of the pandemic, economies with few resources looked to a COVID-19 vaccine as a rational and sustainable way out of the pandemic.

Hardly surprising, though, it soon emerged that rich economies had preordered billions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, leaving few to be purchased by poor countries, most of which are located in Africa.

Pleas by the affected governments, the WHO and regional organizations such as the African Union for equitable distribution of vaccines went unheeded. Meanwhile, the pandemic was increasing in intensity with new waves fueled by more transmissible and deadly variants such as Delta and Omicron.

The only sustainable way to ensure that Africa has access to the vaccines it needs to protect its population is to encourage production on the continent.

An alternative route for Africa is to consider proposals by countries such as China that are already implementing joint vaccine production hubs in Africa. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation 2021 commitments by China to donate 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines, with 400 million doses produced on the continent, will not only enhance access to vaccines in Africa but also foster the strengthening of the continent's industrial capacity and health systems.

Rapid, equitable and sustainable vaccination is the ultimate way to beat the pandemic. As the spread of the Omicron variant has proved, only administered vaccines count. Advanced economies should read from the same script as the rest of the world and jointly work to stem the tide of the global health crisis.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 82b74.html

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As Millions Died in COVID Pandemic, Bankers Made a Killing
January 22, 2022
By Benjamin Norton – Jan 19, 2022

As the COVID-19 pandemic ripped through society, the US government abandoned its people—but made sure banks enjoyed “their best period since the 2007-09 financial crisis.” Capitalists made $5 trillion.

More than 5.55 million people around the world have died from COVID-19. In the United States alone, at least 854,000 people have lost their lives. And the pandemic has destroyed the livelihoods of many more, bankrupting families, devastating communities.

Meanwhile, billionaire oligarchs have made a killing. The 10 richest capitalists on earth doubled their wealth during the pandemic, while the incomes of 99% of humanity decreased.

And the Western financial press is practically rubbing it in our faces.

Reuters published a shockingly blunt story boasting of how US banks have, well, made bank during the global health crisis.

Titled “Wall Street banks eye ‘new normal’ for trading revenue,” the Reuters news wire was republished at the official website of the Nasdaq stock exchange.

The article gloats, “A massive injection of cash into capital markets by the Federal Reserve led to unprecedented liquidity and trading activity through the pandemic as investors sought opportunities to cash in.”

The report then chirps happily, “Banks with large trading desks such as Goldman Sachs GS.N, JPMorgan JPM.N and Morgan Stanley MS.N have been the biggest beneficiaries of market volatility, enabling traders to enjoy their best period since the 2007-09 financial crisis.”

I discussed this “massive injection of cash into capital markets by the Federal Reserve” in an interview with economist Michael Hudson.

The Fed quietly bailed out big banks in September 2019 with $4.5 trillion of emergency repo loans, which according to Hudson appear to have blatantly violated US law. This is in addition to the trillions more the US Treasury poured into the financial sector.

The Reuters article continues, quoting Goldman Sachs’ chief executive officer, David M. Solomon, who told analysts, “None of us could have anticipated the environment that we’ve lived through over the last two years and particularly the environment this year, which was obviously a significant tailwind for our business.”

Note how Goldman Sachs’ CEO wasn’t saying the bank couldn’t have anticipated the millions of deaths; rather, he was saying Wall Street couldn’t have anticipated enjoying its highest profits since the financial crash 14 years ago.

Solomon wasn’t alone. JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum noted that 2020 and 2021, the peak of the pandemic, were “record years.”

The Reuters report quoted an analyst at the investment banking and asset management firm JMP Securities, Devin Ryan, who said, “The bar from 2020 and 2021 is quite high.”

The attitudes of the bankers cited in the piece make it clear: capitalism is a death cult.

Capitalist oligarchs made $5 trillion during the pandemic

While millions of people died in a historic global pandemic, capitalist oligarchs orchestrated a massive upward transfer of wealth.

“The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion—at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day—during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99% of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty,” Oxfam reported.

Capitalist oligarchs made have made $5 trillion during the pandemic, “the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since records began,” Oxfam said.

The humanitarian organization calculated that inequality contributes to the death of at least 21,000 people every day—one person every four seconds.

The US government abandoned its people

While the right wing has hysterically warned of “COVID authoritarianism” and an impending “biomedical state” supposedly on the horizon, the reality is that the United States is already largely the libertarian dystopia that the Koch Brothers and their fellow capitalist oligarch brethren have dreamt of (and invested a whole lot of money in creating).

The ruling ideology of the United States is every man for himself, dog eat dog. This is reflected so clearly in the US government’s response to the largest global health crisis in a century.

This laissez-faire strategy has been bipartisan. Under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the US federal government has essentially done nothing substantive, leaving each state to decide its own fate.

The Biden White House made that clear, telling people they’re on their own. And the US Department of Health and Human Services has told hospitals that, as of February 2, they no longer even have to report daily COVID-19 deaths to the federal government.


Biden claimed he would reverse Trump’s inaction, but his administration has just sat by as 2,000 to 3,000 Americans perish per day due to COVID-19. On January 18, 2022 alone, 2,990 people in the US died of the virus.

The disastrous consequences of this libertarian approach are clear for the world to see: at least 854,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States, according to official statistics.

This is a breathtaking level of human loss—surpassed only by the barbarism of Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right regime in Brazil, which has overseen 622,000 COVID-19 deaths in a population of 213 million. (If Brazil had implemented the same policies, or lack thereof, with the population of the United States, 335 million, it would have 978,000 COVID-19 deaths.)

Meanwhile, in the mainland People’s Republic of China, with a population of 1.4 billion, there have been fewer than 5,000 deaths. In 2021, there were just two COVID-19 deaths in mainland China. Two.


If the United States had the same population of China, we would be talking about 3.6 million dead from COVID-19.

But then again, China’s biggest banks are state owned—and it is the Chinese government that controls the financial sector, not the banks that control the state, like they do in the United States. So it’s difficult for elites in China to make a killing like bankers do in the US “democracy.”


Featured image: Billionaires have made a killing while millions across the world have fallen into poverty during the pandemic. File photo.

https://orinocotribune.com/as-millions- ... a-killing/

[blindpig]

Zero Covid: China silences the critics

This article by Carlos Martinez, originally published in the Morning Star on 24 January 2022, discusses the recent Covid-19 outbreaks and containment measures in the major Chinese cities of Xi’an and Tianjin. The article addresses the flurry of criticism that has appeared in the Western mainstream media in relation to China’s Zero Covid strategy, and concludes that this criticism is designed specifically to demobilise progressive opinion around developing a people-oriented approach to suppressing the pandemic in the West.

It’s coming up to a year since the last death from Covid in China. Since 26 January 2021, China’s Covid death count has been stuck on 4,636. The vast majority – 99.9 percent – of these deaths took place during the first three months of the pandemic, and the most were in Hubei, the province in which the outbreak was first detected. In the southern province of Guangdong, population 125 million, there have been just eight deaths from Covid.

This extraordinary record has been achieved through strict adherence to a Zero Covid policy. Traditional epidemic containment measures – lockdowns, mass testing, social distancing, mask-wearing, hand-washing – have been combined with advanced technology such as AI-based outbreak modelling. In addition, China developed some of the first vaccines, and so far just under 90 percent of the population has received at least two doses.

The Communist Party government has led an incredible, society-wide mobilisation to suppress SARS-CoV-2 and thereby protect human life.

Lockdown in Xi’an
Since the initial outbreak in Wuhan, the health authorities in China have quickly and successfully contained a number of much smaller outbreaks via mass testing, travel restrictions, and short, targeted lockdowns. However, in late December, an outbreak started in the Western city of Xi’an that threatened to get out of control, with daily confirmed cases rising to a peak of 175 on 27 December. We should note in passing that this peak of 175 prompted a much more vigorous response than Britain’s recent peak of 218,376 cases.

To prevent transmission getting out of control and spreading beyond Xi’an, the city’s health authorities took decisive action, imposing a strict city-wide lockdown on 22 December and organising multiple rounds of mass nucleic acid testing.

With 13 million people unable to leave their homes, this was the most extreme set of containment measures in China since the Wuhan lockdown in early 2020. Public transport was shut down, schooling was moved online, and all non-essential businesses were closed.

The local authorities acted to ensure sufficient supplies of grain, oil, vegetables and other staple commodities, and regulators worked to prevent speculation and price gouging. Community workers made contact with every household to ensure people’s nutritional and medical needs were being met, and the city’s health administration established ten medical teams and a 24-hour hotline to help vulnerable and elderly people. Teams of government employees and volunteers delivered millions of boxes of vegetables to residents.

There were unquestionably some mistakes and problems connected with both the outbreak and the containment measures. China’s central government has criticised the local health authorities for responding too slowly to the initial outbreak and for not properly adhering to the national containment protocol. It’s becoming clear that, in applying a Zero Covid strategy, the first 24 hours of an outbreak are critical in terms of setting up mass testing, quarantining patients, and carrying out contact tracing. The faster the response, the better.

One tragic incident that hit the headlines both in China and the West was when staff at Gaoxin Xi’an Hospital turned away a heavily pregnant woman when she was unable to provide evidence of a negative Covid test; she miscarried soon after. Facing widespread anger, the hospital issued a public apology and Vice Mayor Xu Mingfei confirmed that all hospitals were required to set up “green lanes” for pregnant women, critically ill patients, and anyone undergoing dialysis, radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

Problems notwithstanding, the Xi’an lockdown has been a success. Within three weeks, community transmission had effectively ended and restrictions were being gradually lifted. Thousands of lives were saved and the outbreak was prevented from spilling out into neighbouring provinces.

Omicron emerges
In early January, the ultra-contagious Omicron variant made its first appearance in China, in the port city of Tianjin – just half an hour by high-speed rail from Beijing, where the Winter Olympics are due to start in two weeks’ time. The local authorities immediately started mass-testing the city’s 14 million residents, even mandating a half-day holiday so that people could get tested.

Lockdown measures have so far been limited to Jinnan District in the southern part of the city, home to just over half a million people. At the time of writing, the Tianjin outbreak appears to be basically under control.

Crescendo of criticism of Zero Covid
Writing in The Guardian of 5 January, Helen Davidson concedes that there is in China “generally broad support for authorities’ swift response to outbreaks”; that is, the Chinese people largely accept that the positives of Zero Covid – saving millions of lives – outweigh the negatives. Nevertheless, she insists that the strict containment measures are “taking their toll on the population.”

This is just one of a barrage of articles in the Western press over the last few weeks questioning China’s approach to the pandemic. Alexandra Stevenson in the New York Times gave voice to those who feel that “the pain, suffering and confusion caused by the lockdown has made Beijing’s virus strategy appear increasingly unsustainable.” The author asks whether China can really continue to leverage these “authoritarian virus-fighting methods”.

As Zhong Nanshan, one of the China’s best-known epidemiologists and an architect of its suppression strategy, commented in November: “The cost of implementing the current strategy is quite high, indeed. But if you ignore it and just let go of the situation, the cost will be even higher.”

With 18 percent of the global population, China has suffered less than 0.1 percent of all deaths due to Covid since the start of the pandemic. If China’s Covid death rate were the same as the US’s, its pandemic body count would currently stand at 3.7 million rather than 4,636.

Using death rate as a measure of comparing containment strategies, China has performed almost a thousand times better than the US and Britain. And yet the Western press wonders about whether China’s policy is “sustainable”? This appears to be a case of adding 2 and 2 together and getting 3.7 million.

At no point since the lifting of the Wuhan lockdown in Spring 2020 has China had more than 1 percent of its population locked down. Its rapid response to every outbreak has meant that, in addition to saving millions of lives, the vast majority of people in China have been able to live normally. Economic growth, poverty alleviation, infrastructure construction and environmental protection have continued.

All this feels significantly less “authoritarian” than what those of us in Britain have had to endure, with our loved ones dying needlessly while we contend with a hopelessly confused and ineffective set of containment measures (while our national “leadership” is partying away in Downing Street).

For supposedly left-leaning media outlets such as the Guardian and New York Times to disparage China’s Zero Covid strategy means putting their basic class allegiance on display and actively demobilising progressive opinion on the question of how to contain the pandemic.

Britain is a wealthy country with significant resources. The British government could and should follow China’s example in suppressing Covid, but it won’t do so unless faced with extreme public pressure. The media could stimulate that public pressure by holding up China’s example; instead it only slanders China. Apparently the pursuit of New Cold War is a more pressing concern than stopping the pandemic.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/24/z ... e-critics/

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“Everyone’s happy to do their part”: interview with a Xi’an resident in lockdown

We’re pleased to republish this interview of Shi Huli, a community education worker in Xi’an. At the time the interview took place, Shi had been locked down with his family for just over two weeks (the Xi’an lockdown has since been lifted after several days in a row with no transmission). Shi’s description contrasts sharply with the tales of “authoritarianism” published in the Western media: thousands of community workers worked night and day to ensure that every family had sufficient food and supplies, and that people’s medical needs were met. Meanwhile, multiple rounds of mass testing were carried out. The overall result is that a small outbreak in Xi’an – a major city of 13 million people – was prevented from getting out of control.

The interview was carried out by Eben Dombay Williams and originally appeared in Challenge.

Following a recent outbreak of 127 cases of COVID-19, Xi’an, the ancient capital of China and home to the Terracotta Warriors, has become the latest lockdown as a part of China’s “zero COVID” strategy. Despite being the most populous country on Earth and the first to face the disease, China has been one of the greatest success stories in the fight against COVID, achieving not only one of the lowest death rates in the world, but sustaining sharp economic growth while many Western countries have stagnated.

The global fight against the pandemic has now turned into a tale of two systems. Socialist China, which has a planned economy and is able to combine state intervention with grassroots mobilisation to prioritise human need, has only had 4,639 deaths from the disease since the pandemic began, and only two deaths on the mainland throughout the whole of 2021 (Hong Kong and Taiwan have different systems of government and had 64 deaths and 843 deaths respectively). Meanwhile, as two major centres of global capitalism and neoliberalism, the US and the UK have so far had 859,046 and 150,056 deaths apiece from the pandemic, mostly among the poor and working class. Between them, these two countries now have over half the active COVID cases in the world.

Despite these vastly different outcomes, the Western press has argued that China has been naïve in approaching a zero COVID response while other, more sensible countries have “learned to live” with the disease. To prevent us from drawing lessons from China’s strategy, outlets like the Economist have encouraged racist stereotypes that Chinese people are suspicious and secretive, and must therefore be engaged in a nationwide conspiracy to cover up their real figures. Still others have spread fear about China’s lockdowns as being overly authoritarian.

So is this the reality on the ground, and how do ordinary Chinese people view the government’s response? To find out, I spoke to Shi Huli, a community education worker who’s been in lockdown with his family in Xi’an for just over two weeks.

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So, can you give us an overview of the situation in Xi’an?

I live on the outskirts of the city, and since the latest outbreak, Xi’an has adopted the strictest lockdown measures yet. Every major intersection now has a quarantine checkpoint to stop pedestrians walking past, and they’re only allowing through essential supplies and work vehicles. To make sure that everyone has what they need to get by, tens of thousands of Party officials across the city have been going into communities to meet the needs of the people, and they’ve received fresh fruit and vegetables every day.

So far, all 13 million people in Xi’an and 2 million people in Xianyang have already received 6 rounds of testing from their homes, with the last few all performed by medical staff outside individual apartment blocks to avoid too many people gathering together at once. Testing is compulsory and no one is left out.

A few days ago, Zhong Nanshan (a leading medical professional who has guided China’s COVID response) and the Vice Premier of the State Council temporarily led the disease control and prevention work themselves, and we’ve just reached the turning point. That means that the lockdowns will soon be lifted for each district depending on its individual situation, and our lives and the economy will soon go back to normal.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that big data in China is phenomenal. It’s had a very significant impact on controlling and preventing the spread of the disease.

Who watches the quarantine checkpoints, and are they managed 24 hours a day?

Yes, volunteers and security guards watch them 24 hours a day, in three shifts.

Are you allowed to walk around your neighbourhood or do you have to stay at home?

It depends. Code Yellow means that you have to remain quarantined in your home. They’ll put some tape on your door, and the government will bring you free vegetables. They’ll give you tests from home as well.

Other than that, people are free to go out into their local neighbourhood for a bit of exercise.

What does “Code Yellow” mean? Are there other code levels as well?

There are three code levels. Code Green means healthy; Code Yellow either means that the household hasn’t received continuous testing, or they’re near someone with COVID; and Code Red means they’ve either been diagnosed with COVID themselves, or they’ve been in direct contact with someone else who’s been diagnosed.

You said that Xi’an has adopted the strictest measures. Do you think they’re too strict? Aren’t people annoyed by them?

The lockdown is very strict, but no one thinks it’s unnecessary. Everyone’s happy to do their part and follow the prevention strategy.

It’s great that people are so onboard, but let’s say they weren’t and they wanted to break quarantine. What would happen if they broke the rules and left their homes?

(Laughs) Pretty much everyone is happy to follow the rules. I haven’t really heard of anyone breaking them, although there were a few Chinese people on TikTok from overseas who did. In minor cases, they’ll just get a lecture and a slap on the wrist, but in more serious cases they’ll be temporarily restricted from leaving the country.

I guess there are always going to be a few people like that! How many people do you live with, by the way?

There are three of us at home at the moment. So far, we haven’t left our neighbourhood in 15 days.

You must be bored staying at home all day. How do you spend your time?

It is a bit boring, but we’re happy to do it if it means getting through the outbreak. At home we watch TV, sleep, read books, cook, eat, and head downstairs to exercise. Oh, and every 48 hours we get to do our tests! (Laughs)

What work do you do? Are you working from home or are you on leave? And do you still get paid?

I work in community education. I guess you could say I’m on leave, though not really because of the type of work I do.

Other government units, like my old co-workers and friends, haven’t been home for more than ten days since the outbreak. Some are at the disease control centre, some are at the quarantine checkpoints, some are out in the community and on the streets helping the medical professionals, and others are volunteering. I’m staying at home so as not to cause any trouble! (Laughs) But no, my salary isn’t affected.

It sounds like your old colleagues are working really hard! People must really trust the government.

(Laughs) Yes, everyone has a lot of faith in the government. My old comrades are working so, so hard right now.

I also wanted to ask you how people find out the latest information and guidelines. Are they sent straight to people’s phones, or do you need to watch TV?

Like I said before, big data is really incredible in China, and social media is really advanced as well. There are a huge number of channels available for obtaining information: news on TV, WeChat groups, friend groups, etc. Things can be shared across the Internet less than ten minutes after they happen.

You also said that the government’s been sending you fruit and vegetables. Are they free? How do you get other food, medicine, etc.?

Yes, the ones sent to residents in quarantine are free, but neighbourhoods also have a place where we can buy food, as well as daily essentials and anything else we need. For medicine and other specific things, there’s a shop phone at the entrance to the community, and they deliver straight to your door. Cigarettes, beer, drinks, beef, roast chicken… Just make the call and it’ll usually be delivered in just over 10 minutes.

I can see how the government has helped you, but are ordinary people helping each other too? In what ways? What role do volunteers have?

Because there are so many thousands or tens of thousands of Party members helping out, ordinary people have everything they need, so people don’t really need much help. That said, volunteers work to make sure that whatever does need doing gets done. For example, I have a brother volunteering in our neighbourhood who often helps out the other residents by buying them fruit, beer, medicine, things like that.

Okay, the last questions are about the Western media’s response to China’s fight against COVID. Some papers in Britain have been saying that China’s reported figures, like its death rate, are false, and that they’re actually much higher. What’s your opinion on this?

I don’t really want to say too much about politics. If someone has the “wrong” ideology then everything they say is going to be either biased or a lie, and you should know very well who owns the Western media and in whose interests it serves.

China is the only country with a 5,000-year history, and the last of the four ancient civilizations still in existence. Confucianism, the ideas of Confucius and Mencius, has been passed down from generation to generation, so of course we have ideological differences.

As for the figures, no one in the Party or the government would dare try to hide them. If they did, they’d lose their jobs. Take China’s strong testing and mobilisation capacity, for example. Since the start of the pandemic, how many masks, protective clothes, respirators, medical gloves, and all the rest has China provided to the world? If the rate of infection was higher, how could this all be manufactured? That’s just one piece of evidence.

Other papers have said that China’s policies are too strict, and that they infringe upon human rights. How would you respond to that?

They say that the numbers are too low, while also saying that the controls are too strict. Isn’t that a contradiction? Controls in China are strict, but the people understand and accept them.

Chinese people don’t think that having to stay inside is an infringement on their human rights, although there are a few isolated examples of extremely mechanical thinking. For example, a few days ago there was a pregnant woman in Xi’an who miscarried because she wasn’t allowed to enter a hospital more than 48 hours since her last COVID test, which led to a public outcry. It was a private hospital, people voted with their feet, and their stock value dropped by billions in just two days.

That said, the Party is very good at correcting its mistakes. That night, various places issued demands for special measures to be taken in special situations, and special out-patient wards were set up. None of this is my opinion, it’s just a statement of fact, and several leading government officials in the province have already been dismissed for failing to adequately respond to the pandemic.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/26/e ... -lockdown/

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One virus, two systems: infographic comparing Covid strategies in China and the US

It’s been a year since the last death from Covid in China, yet the Western media continues to claim China’s Zero Covid strategy is “unsustainable”. Compared with the West, however, China’s strategy looks decidedly sustainable.



Covid in the US

*Nearly 900,000 deaths due to pandemic
*Every state has suffered multiple major outbreaks
*Epidemic of Long Covid affecting millions
*Elderly and vulnerable people still having to limit social contact
*63 percent of population fully vaccinated
*Hoarded vaccine doses, perpetuating global vaccine apartheid
*Millions have fallen deeper into poverty

Covid in China

*Fewer than 5,000 deaths due to the pandemic
*Hubei the only province to experience severe outbreak
*Very few people suffering with Long Covid
*Virus is under control so people are able to live ordinary lives
*87 percent of population fully vaccinated
*Exported over 2 billion vaccine doses, prioritising Global South
*Poverty alleviation program continues uninterrupted

https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/26/o ... nd-the-us/